Overview
A top-tier automotive manufacturer in China, producing hybrid and electric vehicles at scale, recognized that fragmented data systems and delayed reporting were limiting its ability to act decisively in a rapidly evolving market. Operating as a large multi-brand enterprise with centralized oversight and distributed operations, the company needed to modernize its data strategy to eliminate reporting delays, reduce redundant pipelines, and enable a governed, real-time foundation for analytics, Customer 360, and AI. By deploying Denodo as the backbone of its logical data platform, the company integrated over a dozen systems, eliminated performance bottlenecks, and empowered self-service access to trusted data across the enterprise.
Why Denodo
- Unified data protection and abstraction layer: Provided secure, real-time access to live data from ERP, MES, CRM, and supply chain systems across brands, factories, and markets without physically moving the data. Enabled business teams to work from a single, governed access layer across a highly distributed ecosystem.
- Semantic consistency across a multi-brand enterprise: Aligned KPIs and business definitions across subsidiaries, suppliers, and sales channels through a common semantic layer. This eliminated inconsistencies and supported cross-entity reporting without reengineering source systems.
- Federated governance across geographies and domains: Applied centralized policies for security, access control, and lineage while supporting local autonomy. This ensured regulatory compliance and operational trust across business units and regions.
- Frictionless data product delivery across the value chain: Empowered domain teams to publish and reuse governed data products across procurement, production, logistics, and sales. This accelerated analytics, AI use cases, and operational decision-making.
Challenges
Despite achieving a high level of digital maturity, the enterprise struggled to turn its vast and distributed data landscape into timely, actionable insights. Operational silos, inconsistent metrics, and manual reporting processes created friction across business units and slowed decision-making.
- Data was spread across 450+ assets in 70+ systems spanning 15 business domains, making cross-functional reporting slow and inconsistent
- Subsidiaries operated independent stacks, causing fragmentation across ERP, MES, CRM, SRM, and BOM systems
- Dashboards took up to 90 seconds to load, and daily reports required manual aggregation
- Monitoring production, inventory, and orders across brands and regions lacked consistency and timeliness
- Rigid ETL pipelines made it difficult to support emerging use cases like Customer 360 and AI-driven forecasting
Solution
The enterprise implemented a logical data platform using Denodo, enabling real-time data access across systems without physical replication of the data or ETL rework. Key capabilities of the solution included:
- Unified semantics: Established consistent business definitions across subsidiaries, aligning key KPIs such as order backlog, inventory index, and production rate. Provided governed access to trusted data for rapid prototyping, AI development, and cross-entity analytics.
- Abstraction layer: Exposed live data from core enterprise systems including SAP, MES, CRM, and marketing platforms. Denodo’s logical data management capability ensured performance and simplified integration without the need for physical data replication.
- Daily analytics delivery: Automated data refreshes and dashboard delivery such as daily order analysis, effective order tracking, regional performance, and city-level trends through the Denodo Scheduler.
- Federated governance enforcement: Applied group-wide access control using Denodo’s role-based security model. Enabled cross-border access, end-to-end lineage, and traceability through Denodo’s active metadata and data catalog integration, aligned to enterprise governance goals.
- Data productization: Empowered business and IT teams to manage domain-aligned data products with governed, reusable assets published through a common business semantic layer. This structure now underpins operational reporting, AI use cases, and self-service analytics across the enterprise without the overhead of new pipelines.
Benefits
Near Real-Time Enterprise Visibility Enabling Faster Decisions
- Delivered a “One Enterprise, One Screen” view, providing HQ near real-time visibility into sales, production, and inventory KPIs across subsidiaries through a unified semantic data access layer.
Significant Performance and Efficiency Gains
- Achieved >20x acceleration in report query speed, reducing time from 2 minutes to under 3 seconds.
- Reallocated 6 FTEs from manual reporting tasks, freeing up time for higher-value analytics and strategic initiatives.
- Built 10+ business-critical reports in just one week by a single engineer working with 70+ virtualized tables.
