Enhanced Business Intelligence and Data-driven Decision-Making at BHG Finland

BHG is one of the largest consumer e-commerce companies in the Nordics, specializing in the home improvement and Do-It-Yourself sectors. In Finland, BHG’s largest e-commerce stores, taloon.com, netrauta.fi and talotarvike.com cover over 280,000 items from over 1,000 brands. This selection attracts more than two million unique visitors each month.

What was the challenge?

BHG Finland is built on a collection of several companies that have merged and been acquired over time, all with their own IT tools and systems. One of BHG Finland’s central IT solutions is its business Intelligence (BI) system, which is, among other things, used for financial steering and reporting on all levels of the organization. However, point-to-point integrations were becoming a burden.

“The end-users of the BI system range from product and category managers to the company CEO,” explains Pekka Rantanen, Cloud Services and Integrations Lead for BHG Finland. “The numerous integrations between other systems and the BI tool were not monitored,” Rantanen continues “This, in turn, meant that IT might not have known about problems in timeliness or quality of the data before the users noticed that the financial numbers were not up to date when they needed them.“

The inaccuracies also hurt the overall trust in the reporting system as end-users began to have doubts about the reliability of the data.

Our solution

Codento architected and implemented a data platform that not only centralized BHG Finland’s diverse data sources, but also enabled advanced analytics and business intelligence capabilities.

Utilizing cutting-edge technologies and frameworks, the platform was designed to be highly scalable, secure, and compliant with industry regulations by following Google Cloud’s best practices. It featured event-based data ingestion, robust ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines for data ingestion (Workflows & Cloud Functions), a data warehouse with analytics (Cloud Storage & BigQuery), and a user-friendly dashboard for easy access to key performance indicators and monitoring with alerts (Logs Explorer).

The platform was deployed entirely using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform). We ensured seamless integration with BHG’s existing systems to facilitate a smooth transition and limit operational downtime.

Why Codento?

BHG Finland chose Codento for its complex data platform development project due to our specialized experience in data architecture and analytics, which allowed us to build a system that met the customer’s requirements.

Both parties actively participated in daily meetings and upheld a shared Slack channel, ensuring a continuous flow of feedback, transparency, and effective knowledge transfer.

Our transparent approach to project management kept BHG Finland in the loop at all stages, from initial consultation to final implementation, fostering a collaborative relationship that extended to post-launch support and maintenance.

What were the results?

Implementing the new data platform marked a significant turning point for BHG Finland. The customer experienced an immediate improvement in data accessibility and integrity. Moreover, the new system enhanced data governance, making it easier for BHG Finland to meet compliance requirements. Operational efficiencies gained through the platform’s capabilities allowed BHG Finland to allocate resources to other initiatives.

The adaptable platform design also accommodates future development, particularly integrating supplementary data pipelines, which will continuously enhance its advantages.

In the customer’s own words

“We now have a rock-solid foundation for our data collection, storing, conversions, and sharing. Our data foundation is smartly designed and implemented, centralized, and monitored to accompany our future needs. Codento’s professionalism and helpfulness have been delightful.”

By: Pekka Rantanen, Cloud Services and Integrations Lead, BHG Finland