Operational Analytics To Increase Efficiency For Multi-Location Businesses With OpsAnalitica

Summary

In order to improve efficiency in any business you must first know what is contributing to wasted effort or missed opportunities. When your business operates across multiple locations it becomes even more challenging and important to gain insights into how work is being done. In this episode Tommy Yionoulis shares his experiences working in the service and hospitality industries and how that led him to found OpsAnalitica, a platform for collecting and analyzing metrics on multi location businesses and their operational practices. He discusses the challenges of making data collection purposeful and efficient without distracting employees from their primary duties and how business owners can use the provided analytics to support their staff in their duties.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
• When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
• RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder.
• Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer.
• You wake up to a Slack message from your CEO, who’s upset because the company’s revenue dashboard is broken. You’re told to fix it before this morning’s board meeting, which is just minutes away. Enter Metaplane, the industry’s only self-serve data observability tool. In just a few clicks, you identify the issue’s root cause, conduct an impact analysis⁠—and save the day. Data leaders at Imperfect Foods, Drift, and Vendr love Metaplane because it helps them catch, investigate, and fix data quality issues before their stakeholders ever notice they exist. Setup takes 30 minutes. You can literally get up and running with Metaplane by the end of this podcast. Sign up for a free-forever plan at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metaplane, or try out their most advanced features with a 14-day free trial. Mention the podcast to get a free "In Data We Trust World Tour" t-shirt.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tommy Yionoulis about using data to improve efficiencies in multi-location service businesses with OpsAnalitica

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what OpsAnalitica is and the story behind it?
• What are some examples of the types of questions that business owners and site managers need to answer in order to run their operations?
  • What are the sources of information that are needed to be able to answer these questions?
  • In the absence of a platform like OpsAnalitica, how are business operations getting the answers to these questions?
• What are some of the sources of inefficiency that they are contending with?
  • How do those inefficiencies compound as you scale the number of locations?
• Can you describe how the OpsAnalitica system is implemented?
  • How have the design and goals of the platform evolved since you started working on it?
• Can you describe the workflow for a business using OpsAnalitica?
• What are some of the biggest integration challenges that you have to address?
• What are some of the design elements that you have invested in to reduce errors and complexity for employees tracking relevant metrics?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen OpsAnalitica used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on OpsAnalitica?
• When is OpsAnalitica the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of OpsAnalitica?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
• If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com) with your story.
• To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

• OpsAnalitica
• Quiznos
• FormRouter
• Cooper Atkins(?)
• SensorThings API
• The Founder movie
• Toast
• Looker
  • Podcast Episode
• Power BI
  • Podcast Episode
• Pareto Principle
• Decisions workflow platform

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA