How To Derive Value through Data Engineering Capabilities

Although digitization as a trend emerged around the middle of the last century, the trend rose sharply during the 1990s, driven by the advent of the internet. Since then, we have been witnesses to changes in the way we work and live. Tactile information was subject to a digital transformation – being converted into a virtual format – that could be stored as bits and bytes on magnetic media.

The basic advantage

This digitization impacted how we store information. We did not need square feet of floor and shelf space to store books, files, photographs, and film. All the information could be stored on magnetic media, and computer technology allowed for the adding, sorting, filtering, searching, modifying, deleting and otherwise maintaining all this information. The space required was a fraction of that required to store the physical formats; costs fell.

The next advantage

Gradually, as needs were perceived, computer technology evolved to allow for processing this information to become more useful to users. Operations like complex calculations, formatting reports, relating different pieces of data, and displaying specific information on demand have now become commonplace. Some businesses realized that the benefits provided excellent value and invested in digitization and have realized the benefits.

What is digitization?

Most companies are using data (the bits and bytes form of information) internally. Data in documents like Invoices, Purchase Orders, Receipts, Proposals, Quotations are being manually entered into word processors, spreadsheets and databases for further processing. This itself reduced time to make decisions, some of which affected the business as a whole. However, time was spent in manual data entry. Scanners are a partial solution; but what if the information is handwritten?

Further, digitization capabilities expanded to enable generating digitized information directly. So, there are applications that created digitized forms of invoices, purchase orders, receipts and other documents. Transferring these documents to other business entities and customers involved using different document formats. MS Word, MS Excel, and PDF are the common formats being used today.

Next what?

Although there are efforts to standardize different information formats, each player in this space wants their own formats to become universally accepted. This hasn’t worked too well, as the software applications required to generate information are mostly proprietary.

The Approach

Given the advances in technology, there is a case for creating applications that can read digital data in different formats (Extraction), intelligently transform this data into a standard format and validate the data (Transform), and provide the transformed data in a standard format for further use. This entire process is the ETL Framework in Data Engineering.

The future

The future is here. The disparate data that has been wrung through the ETL Framework can be used for:

• Reports – that provide information that is instinctively easy to interpret
• Dashboards – that show up-to-date status of the various parts of a business
• Analyses – find insights that are not visible when the data is not aggregated and standardized
• Predictions – apply predictive analytics to forecast probable business scenarios

At InnoBoon Technologies, this is a core competency. Our Data Engineering practice aims to first understand the requirement, analyze the status quo, then build the extract-transform-load (ETL) framework with automatic data pipelines that, when implemented, makes data visible in the best possible format.

We have a Product Engineering practice that builds bespoke applications addressing specific requirements.

Extract value from your data, and implement solutions that can add immense value to your business into the future.

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Consult with us.