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Glidewell Laboratories Gains Deeper Data Insights Faster with Amazon Redshift and Attunity
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Manufacturing System Automation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
Glidewell Laboratories, the largest dental lab in the United States, faced a significant challenge when they adopted the CAD/CAM Digital Manufacturing standard. The adoption led to a tenfold increase in the amount of data the company had to store and analyze, reaching over 150 million records. To manage this change, Glidewell aimed to create a more responsive, cloud-based infrastructure to support business intelligence and analytics. However, cloud migrations can be tricky, often requiring custom coding that slows down the process, reducing the time-based value of analytics for quick business decision-making. Glidewell's on-premises data storage solution included over 80 separate databases, adding to the complexity of the migration.
About The Customer
Glidewell Laboratories is the largest dental lab in the United States, manufacturing over three million custom dental products annually. The company's products include crowns, dentures, and custom prosthetics made from molds at dentist’s offices. When Glidewell adopted the CAD/CAM Digital Manufacturing standard, the amount of data the company had to store and analyze exploded tenfold, to over 150 million records. To manage this change, Glidewell aimed to create a more responsive, cloud-based infrastructure to support business intelligence and analytics. However, the company faced challenges in migrating its vast amount of data to the cloud.
The Solution
Glidewell identified Amazon Redshift and Attunity as an ideal solution for their data migration challenge. Amazon Redshift, a powerful data warehousing solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS), met Glidewell’s need for a progressive data warehouse and analytics stack. The dynamic, cloud-based platform features low barriers to entry and minimal up-front costs with a self-service model. The fully-managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service would make it possible to analyze data simply and cost-effectively using Glidewell’s preferred business intelligence tools—Tableau Software for analytics and Dundas Data Visualization for dashboards. For the data migration, Glidewell’s team considered traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, but the customization, ongoing IT management, and extensive training required rendered it too cumbersome for Glidewell’s needs. That’s when an AWS team member introduced Attunity, an Amazon Partner Network (APN) company. The powerful, yet affordable Attunity for Redshift solution enabled Glidewell to replicate data from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Redshift with just a few clicks, without the need for costly customizations or specialized training.
Operational Impact
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