Helping Data Operations Soar at Aurora Flight Sciences
Overview
Aurora Flight Sciences (Aurora) is a company that develops next-generation aircraft for tomorrow's commercial and government markets. They design and test first-of-a-kind air vehicles as well as the technologies that power them, and they manufacture aerospace components and airframes. By specializing in technologies such as autonomy, electric propulsion, and advanced manufacturing, Aurora creates aircraft designed to make the future of flight safer and more efficient.
Due to federal regulatory compliance requirements, Aurora found itself in need of a rapid migration of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. At the same time, Aurora sought to overhaul its data infrastructure and implement a modern cloud architecture that enabled faster and more impactful decision-making. They also needed to unlock executive-level insights through analytics and dashboards that displayed employee information, manufacturing performance, and other key metrics. That’s where Brooklyn Data came in.
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Challenge
While the Aurora team handled the bulk of the ERP migration work, they needed assistance in integrating critical business operations and supporting infrastructure into their data stack. They were in search of a partner who could design and implement a system inclusive of all data sources across the business and provide them with the business intelligence they needed to grow.
Business intelligence specifically was a top priority for Aurora. They didn’t just need to bring together data from all of their systems – they needed actionable reports and self-service capabilities to ensure their reporting and analytics could grow alongside their business.
Equally important was giving Aurora the ability to track timesheets across the entire organization. They needed to build and implement a solution that allows employees and managers to update and edit their timesheets while seamlessly communicating with their SAP.
The client’s challenges included:
- Create a brand new reporting and analytics infrastructure.
- Provide self-service capabilities for Aurora's users.
- Establish a system of data governance and quality assurance to ensure the integrity of data.
- Minimize disruption to core business functions during Aurora's data overhaul.
Approach
We began working with Aurora with a discovery deep dive, probing the ins and outs of their data architecture and examining critical points in their business operations. This included speaking with stakeholders and decision-makers across multiple departments, conducting security risk assessments, and reviewing the entirety of their data and reporting infrastructure with a fine-tooth comb.
From there, we developed a long-term road map while addressing Aurora's immediate needs for an ERP migration and upgrade. This roadmap was implemented using modern best practices, including automated infrastructure, version control, unit and integration tests, and documentation, and executed using agile sprints.
Our approach included:
- Interview stakeholders across the business to identify areas where data (or the lack thereof) was impacting decision-making.
- Examine Aurora's current data infrastructure and reporting and analytics capabilities.
- Identify high-priority data sources with critical business impact.
- Aggregate our findings into a sprint-level roadmap designed to migrate and overhaul their data practices.
Solution
Our team implemented a robust, secure, gold-standard data foundation for Aurora Flight Sciences, supporting their broader SAP migration. We developed a FedRAMP compliant, AWS cloud-based infrastructure using Databricks, which enabled data-driven insights and faster decision-making.
We also deployed Tier-1 Dashboards to facilitate more informed decision-making for their manufacturing team, built new data applications to streamline tracking, and trained the Aurora team to leverage their new data infrastructure.
The Brooklyn Data team also built Labor Collect, a web-based application for employees and managers to enter and track their timesheets on the factory floor across the entire organization. This feature will be rolled out with the upcoming ERP migration in the near future - helping to maximize transparency and turned a complex business into a coherent, unified operation by integrating directly with their new SAP system.
Results:
- Data warehousing: We built a flexible, scalable foundation to store, manage, and analyze all of Aurora's data in one place.
- Data ingestion: We deployed a system that pulls in data from their key sources, loads it into the warehouse, and automatically detects and merges new fields from upstream pipelines.
- Transformations: We implemented a process that cleans and structures raw data into easy-to-use, high-performance tables and adopted a "medallion" approach - bronze (raw), silver (cleaned), and gold (analysis-ready) - to maintain organization.
- Business intelligence: We launched a self-service business intelligence capability that enables the Aurora data team to build their own dashboards using the polished ERP data in our warehouse.