For more than 100 years, Master Builders New Zealand has been the voice of industry quality. Officially known as Registered Master Builders Association (RMBA), the organisation represents a group of skilled builders and construction companies which meet the highest standards in craftsmanship, business practices, and ethical conduct.
Master Builders New Zealand turns on Snowflake for real-time reporting
Client
Master Builders New Zealand
Scope of work
Industry
Construction
Location
New Zealand
Overview
In New Zealand, the construction industry contributes more than NZD$17.5 billion to annual GDP but garners a high insolvency rate. RMBA plays an active role in protecting the sector through its Guarantees product. Offered to its 3,000 members, the Master Build Guarantee provides assurance against construction issues, should anything unforeseen occur during and after a build.
Business Opportunity
With a business history that spans several decades, RMBA was motivated to leave behind manual processes accumulated from its years of operations, and kickstart a digital transformation.
To deliver ‘early warning signs’ to its board and executives, RMBA’s Operations team was previously spending several days each month preparing manual reports on high-risk members – a burden on productivity. To reduce reliance on these manual processes, RMBA realised it needed to overhaul its fragmented data landscape and implement a technology architecture that would unlock automation and data visibility while catapulting future growth.
Without an IT team to assist the project, RMBA partnered with Atturra to implement a modern data stack that would self-service the business.
“ We were still using excel spreadsheets to make complex business decisions, and this was particularly burdensome for our management of high-risk builders. When dealing with industry risk, you need to be able to act quickly. It was therefore essential to gain a consolidated view of the organisation to not only reduce risk but give our members better services.”
Ankit Sharma
Chief Executive Officer at RMBA
Atturra Solution
Atturra’s track record in delivering successful data projects allowed it to link RMBA’s digital transformation with the evolving technology landscape and introduce best-in-class data management and analytics tools that would suit the organisation’s specific reporting needs.
RMBA selected Snowflake Data Lake for scalable cloud data warehousing, citing the benefits of its advanced reporting frameworks and decoupled design, which offers RMBA low cost of ownership (TCO) with a full managed service through Atturra.
To complement Snowflake and deliver a full solution, RMBA chose Fivetran for automated data integration, Coalesce for advanced data transformation, and ThoughtSpot for business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Together, the implementation allows RMBA to sync up with its credit score partner and external reviewing body to produce comprehensive insights.
As part of ongoing management and support, Atturra helped RMBA establish a crossfunctional team, equipping them with work collaboration tools Jira, Confluence, and Slack to improve business agility. Further, Atturra offers RMBA Managed Services and support to maintain, upgrade and troubleshoot their Snowflake instance without needing any internal resources or investments.
Outcomes achieved
With the modern data stack introduced and managed by Atturra, RMBA has real-time access to critical data, providing executives with a regular pulse on the state of the business and its members. This dynamic reporting capability has also greatly reduced administrative hours in the Operations team. In fact, with AI embedded into the solution, RMBA employees are more efficiently and intuitively using Natural Language Querying to draw out detailed insights.
The information employees can now access is also far more comprehensive. This level of granularity is advancing decision-making around the proactive management of high-risk members, which is beneficial in protecting RMBA’s reputation and business model.
Beyond the streamlining of processes, the implementation is equipping RMBA with tools that help it to stay ahead in a competitive market. Self-service BI and analytics, for example, empower the business through data analysis and predictive forecasting, which help inform possible changes in the market.
“New Zealand’s construction industry is gearing up for growth, particularly around the creation of more climate-resilient infrastructure, and we’re proud to support RMBA as it sets an industry benchmark for digital efficiency in this time of change” said David Griffith, Chief Data Architect at Atturra. “With a digital transformation puzzle pieced together by Atturra, RMBA can deliver outcomes that better protect the industry.”
