Takeaways:
Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the building sector and motor vehicle industry. Founded in 1910, Sika today has subsidiaries in 100 countries around the world and manufactures in over 300 factories. Its 25,000 employees generated annual sales of CHF 7.88 billion in 2020.
As winner of the Swiss Innovation Award 2019, Sika stands for innovation in all areas. In order to meet the diversified information needs of global customers, Sika IT relies on Google Cloud for comprehensive data analytics relating to the company’s website.
As a leading Public Cloud provider, Google Cloud covers everything from databases to predictive analytics to ensure that you get the most out of your business data. The individual products are easy to combine. Wabion has, for example, developed a data analytics platform for AXA — Switzerland’s leading insurance provider — which combines Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Dataflow and BigQuery.
As a central internal service provider for an innovation champion, Sika IT is committed to continuously optimizing its own offering. While looking for a competent partner for a technical audit of the existing system and tool landscape in the area of big data and data analytics, Sika IT came across the Google Cloud Premier Partner Wabion. Wabion has extensive expertise in the use of Google Cloud for data analytics from projects for companies such as AXA, Swiss Steel and Callpoint. With this wealth of experience in their backpacks, the Wabion experts set out on the following tasks:
Like many global companies, Sika pursues a multi-cloud strategy and uses the offers of various hyperscalers. For the web analytics platform, the company relies on leading data analytics solutions from Google Cloud, i.e. a combination of Google Analytics, BigQuery and Google Data Studio:
BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless and cost-efficient data warehouse is at the core of the Sika web analytics platform. Based on data from Google Analytics, the web analytics KPIs (number of visits per country, time spent per page, downloads, etc.) are calculated in BigQuery. The data visualizations and the requested reports are created in the Google Cloud Studio.
During the review, Wabion subjected the existing architecture of the Sika web analytics platform to a thorough examination. Based on both own and adapted Best Practices, this technical audit resulted in a series of recommendations for the future setup:
Presenting the recommended measures in a deep dive workshop, Wabion provided the Sika IT team with a guide to mix their own know-how with Wabion’s expertise for optimizing the web analytics platform in the best possible way.
There are various formulas for success not only in specialty chemistry, but also in cloud computing. The Wabion Analytics Consulting has several positive effects on the Sika web analytics platform:
A clean setup also paves the way for using data analytics beyond web analytics. With BigQuery Omni, powered by Anthos, Google Cloud has been offering a data analytics solution across various hyperscalers since 2020. Companies that pursue a multi-cloud strategy like Sika will primarily benefit from this.