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Case Study: Robotics Plus
Data integration
| Budgeting and planning
Featuring
Hamish Kemp, Business Systems Analyst
Justine Brown, Delivery Manager
Business value delivered
• Streamlined ingestion of data to Snowflake from multiple sources such as monday.com, PayHero, and more.
• Accelerated planning cycles with near-real-time sync compared to hours with the previous solution.
• Reduced cyber-security risk by removing a data-handling SaaS tool.
About Robotics Plus
Robotics Plus is a New Zealand-based agritech company that gives customers the power to adapt and thrive in the ever-changing environment of our primary industries. We specialise in the design and build of robotics, AI, and autonomous machines that reduce reliance on labour and provide data-driven insights for informed decision-making. Designed, tested, and proven in real environments to solve real problems, our solutions are brought to life by a highly agile and deeply capable team. The result is products and solutions that not only have the smarts to do the job, but to keep doing it better, helping create a more sustainable and successful agricultural sector. For more information visit: https://www.roboticsplus.co.nz/
Robotics Plus has been very happy with the change to Omnata and the flexible nature of the platform. Through Omnata and Data Engineers, we have been able to mould our data pipelines to ideally suit the ways we work.
Hamish Kemp, Business Systems Analyst
Slow data refreshes were holding up business planning
As a company involved in the R&D of agricultural technologies, project planning and tracking is vital to the efficient and effective development of Robotics Plus products. Planning is developed in monday.com boards which contain detailed information across a multitude of projects. Actual resource consumption is recorded through software platforms like Xero and PayHero to allow Robotics Plus to track and measure plans versus reality.
With plans constantly evolving, the need for near real time, aggregated visualisation of work efforts came to the fore, both from a resource supply and demand perspective. Our existing data pipeline infrastructure could not effectively accommodate the shorter refresh cycles required and varied data sources employed by the business, so the search began for a solution that would provide the functionality and flexibility desired.
Omnata and Data Engineers efficiently deliver a flexible solution
Working with Data Engineers (our data engineering partner), we came to the agreement that Omnata, a Snowflake Native App, was the ideal platform. This would provide the flexibility to sync our numerous data sources, providing near real time views of project tracking. Data Engineers and Omnata partnered in developing approved connectors for all our key software systems inside the Omnata Sync Engine.
Omnata pulls data from various SaaS sources including monday.com, PayHero, ApprovalMax and these plugins are openly available on the Snowflake Marketplace.
Justine Brown, Delivery Manager
A simpler architecture and faster planning cycle times
The change to Omnata has provided a responsive view of planning and project tracking desperately needed by the business. It helps identify inefficient resource allocation, duplication of workload and tasks, improved tracking of project budgets, and has reduced the security blast area for Robotic Plus by removing the need to have a 3rd Party hosted data ‘middleware’ service as Omnata runs solely within our Snowflake instance.
The benefits from these changes have been particularly significant to our financial planning process. What was once a slow and laborious process is now agile and responsive, by minimising the feedback timeframes of planning changes.
