FPT is the largest private Vietnamese ICT company, spanning 27 countries with ten subsidiaries and affiliates. It implemented Azure Big Data Analytics services to empower its global teams with timely insights, providing a 360-degree view of enterprise-wide data. With on-demand access to real-time business reports, management can now make decisions at the speed of their business. Additionally, a detailed picture of all company data makes employees more productive, enabling them to respond to business demands faster and more accurately.
A leading light in digital transformation and technology innovation, FPT continues its mission of promoting rapid growth, developing new technologies, and fostering digital solutions on a global scale. However, its international expansion brought the challenge of keeping the data accessible, consistent, and secure for 40 thousand employees worldwide. “We needed a solution to connect multiple lines-of-business information from different subsidiaries to give our teams insights they need to improve our business performance,” says Nguyen The Phuong, Chief Financial Officer at FPT.
Creating a single source of truth
The previous legacy ERP system was ineffective, slowed decision-making, and took too long to aggregate, analyze, and display data to the management. “Data was not standardized across our branches and lines of business,” reveals The Phuong, “We couldn’t generate valuable insights quickly enough, and subsequently, we experienced delays in corporate governance.” Additionally, as the company was expanding and data started to grow exponentially, the reporting modules failed to provide a complete performance view of the group and its subsidiaries. “With offices in 27 countries, the capability to make timely and data-driven decisions based on a unified 360-degree view is crucial. Unfortunately, we did not have it,” The Phuong adds.
The company turned to its subsidiary, FPT Software, to consolidate data across divisions and get holistic insights into all business units. Its experts suggested building a big data lake based on Azure data analytics services. “We’ve been closely collaborating with Microsoft over the years,” says Tran Tien Phuoc, Director of FPT Software’s Enterprise Data Management Unit. “So we knew Azure Data Lake rises as one of the most powerful data solutions. It is flexible and effective in terms of the available cost models, data types and sources it captures.”
Built for now and the future
Considering the size of the company and its ambitious growth plans, one of the key requirements for the new solution was to be easily extensible. “Data Lake meets this condition,” confirms Tien Phuoc. “It works with multiple Microsoft products, such as Power BI, Data Factory, and Synapse Analytics, but also allows using third-party applications. This is critical as we can plan for long-term development.”
Built for big data, the solution captures all data types from various sources and across all departments. “We have collected and ingested data from finance, CRM, HR, marketing, and legacy systems in Azure Data Factory, an automated integration service for hyper-scale data,” details Tien Phuoc. First, the enterprise-wide big data workloads are stored in Azure Data Lake Storage. Then, they are processed by Azure Databricks and made available to the end users through Azure Synapse Analytics. “Azure allows our teams to easily query mass volumes of data, gaining valuable insights to act on immediately,” The Phuong explains.
Unlimited insights shared instantly, at scale
With Azure, it takes FPT staff seconds to consolidate business reports. In addition, since the new system operates in real-time, there is no need to tweak them to get the most recent data snapshot manually. “Before, we would generate reports once a month and waste a day resolving discrepancies,” says The Phuong. “Now, we can access the latest information any time, exactly when we need it.”
Empowered with a single source of truth for business insights, the company management can make data-driven decisions faster whenever required. “We can leverage all the data to make smarter decisions in a shorter time,” The Phuong says. Ease of data access and automations reduce menial accounting tasks. In the past, each of the company’s ten subsidiaries needed three accountants to develop monthly reports. Now, they can attend to more ambitious and engaging jobs, as flawless reports can be generated ad hoc by any user.
“Azure Data Lake is the catalyst to foster a data-driven approach in managing all our lines of business,” sums up The Phuong. “In our previous solution, data from various sources from our subsidiaries was not standardized and harmonized to be appropriately shared across the group. With the service brought by Microsoft and FPT’s skilled data engineers, we have successfully solved our issues with data access and gained timely decision-making in corporate governance,” he ends.