Project Context

Working for a manufacturing solar start-up (~200 employees), I pitched and executed the development of a centralized database to store, centralize, and leverage business and product data from factory to field for two distinct business cases.

The project involved creating data pipelines from 5B’s ERP, CRM, project planning, and field reporting software into AWS object storage and a structured PostgreSQL database. This project saved 50+hrs/month in data entry & retrieval, with data was made accessible to internal customers via 4 live dashboards, reports, and SQL queries for in-depth analysis.

Challenges

One technical challenge was understanding and querying the heavily customized Odoo ERP data was difficult, particularly linking components of a 4-level BoM to Purchase Orders and Transfer Orders for supplier traceability.

Another challenge was to handle various roles, including database architecture, data analysis, cloud setup, and data engineering, while managing and mentoring an intern. I was new to cloud engineering, an dI had to learn a lot of best practices on the fly.

To address these challenges, I maintained clear communication with stakeholders, adhered to a bi-monthly release schedule, and sought advice from colleagues with similar experiences.

Project Outcome

In just 6 months of work (at 50% FTE), our small team provided the first source of truth for data at a company level.

We managed to reduce data entry and retrieval time (eg. for board meetings, product owners), by 50+ hrs/week; make project, supply chain, and engineering data very accessible via dashboards and reports. Ultimately, management decided to continue the project , and I assisted in hiring a successor to expand on this initial data infrastructure.