Manufacturing Enterprise: Legacy Warehouse to Cloud Lakehouse Migration

The Challenge

A multi-site manufacturing enterprise was running production and supply chain reporting on a decade-old on-premise data warehouse that had outgrown its original design. Nightly ETL jobs regularly ran past their window into the next business day, plant managers were generating critical production reports by exporting to spreadsheets and reconciling by hand, and the data engineering team spent more time firefighting failed jobs than building anything new.

Leadership needed real-time visibility into production and supply chain data to support expansion decisions, but the existing platform had no realistic path to scale, and no one on the internal team had led a cloud data platform migration of this scope before.

Our Approach

We began with a structured assessment of the existing warehouse, source systems, and data quality issues that had accumulated over a decade of point fixes. The modernisation roadmap that followed was sequenced by business priority, not technical convenience — the highest-value reporting use cases moved first.

• Designed a cloud lakehouse architecture consolidating data from twelve plant-level source systems into a single governed platform
• Rebuilt ETL processes as version-controlled, tested dbt models, replacing a decade of undocumented stored procedures
• Implemented a data quality and governance framework with defined ownership per dataset, ending the spreadsheet reconciliation process plant managers had relied on
• Migrated historical data in sequenced waves with parallel-run validation, so reporting never went dark during the transition
• Delivered a semantic layer and self-service BI environment so plant managers could build their own reports without engineering support

The Results

The new lakehouse platform cut report generation time from days to minutes and eliminated the manual spreadsheet reconciliation that plant managers had depended on for years. The data engineering team, freed from constant firefighting, has since built several new analytics capabilities that weren't feasible on the old platform.

• Days to minutes — production reporting time cut from multi-day manual reconciliation to real-time dashboards
• 12 plant systems consolidated into a single governed data platform
• Zero nightly ETL failures spilling into business hours since go-live
• Self-service BI adopted by plant managers without engineering dependency