Maravai LifeSciences modernizes financial analytics

‍Maravai LifeSciences is a leading life sciences company providing critical products to enable the development of drug therapies, diagnostics, novel vaccines and support research on human diseases. Maravai’s companies are leaders in providing products and services in the fields of nucleic acid synthesis, bioprocess impurity detection and analysis, and protein labeling and detection to many of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical, vaccine, diagnostics, and cell and gene therapy companies. Having multiple subsidiaries operating autonomously led to analytics challenges. Leadership wanted more holistic insight and reporting on all of Maravai LifeSciences, beginning with financial planning and analysis (FP&A). The business realized this would require replacing Excel-based reporting with a modernized architecture and analytics.

Understanding Business Challenges Around Finance Analytics

Kevin Herde, CFO of Maravai LifeSciences, engaged Slalom Consulting to assist in the planning and implementation of a sustainable analytics architecture to support long-term business growth. Before building the modern data architecture, Slalom began by interviewing leaders across the organization to better understand the challenges and needs. Some common challenges included:

• Disparate data sources required manual blending, significant cleanup and transformation to create a full data set
• Information was not readily available and required digging to uncover
• Needed deeper analysis to understand market trends, to be able to forecast and demand plan
• Data discrepancies between Salesforce and NetSuite
• Excel reports required manual generation and were time-consuming to produce
• No “single source of truth “ system with access to all key decision-makers

Armed with knowledge of what needed to change, Slalom’s team of Data & Analytics Architects, Warehouse Architects, and Developers set out to create the perfect modern architecture for Maravai LifeSciences.

Bringing on the Modern Data Stack

It was important for Maravai LifeSciences to have easy access to its data and to be able to easily uncover insights without having to manage data integration workflows. Based on the business requirements, Slalom recommended a modern data stack of Fivetran, Snowflake and Tableau, highlighting the following reasons:

• Fivetran: in terms of ease of deployment and use, Fivetran came out on top with simple point-and-click data replication
• Snowflake: the market leader for enabling Data Cloud solutions as a service in as automated a manner as possible with little maintenance
• Tableau: immense reporting capabilities, ease of deployment, tool maturity and compatibilities

Slalom went with the three solutions. Akshay Mehta, Client Services Leader for Maravai LifeSciences and Ryan McNaught, Data & Analytics Leader, shared:

Based on our guiding principles, especially those pertaining to leveraging software as a service with as little coding or specialized expertise as possible, our teams selected Fivetran for data replication into Snowflake for effortless analytics in Tableau. While there were other capable vendors, their solutions would ultimately take longer to deploy and be more costly to maintain over time. These three vendors are aligned well in their internal roadmaps for continuous integration improvements and have proven to drive business value in all areas of importance to Maravai LifeSciences.

Building Scalable Business Intelligence

Slalom’s Tableau Architect & Developer and Data & Analytics Solution Architect have built multiple dashboards with the modern data stack. The Executive Summary dashboard includes metrics like revenue, gross margin, average daily sales compared to budget, forecast and historical metrics. Two additional dashboards focus on sales revenue and customer analytics. The business can now answer all of its financial questions, including:

• How is revenue performing compared to the same time last year?
• What is one subsidiary’s average daily sales for the past quarter? What about the past year?
• How has a subsidiary company’s margin increased or decreased since last year?
• Who are the top five customers for each subsidiary?
• Which customer region contributes most to total revenue?

These mission-critical dashboards have changed the way that Maravai LifeSciences answers questions and drives business decisions. Within ten weeks, Slalom delivered an entire modern data architecture, with Fivetran replicating NetSuite data into Snowflake, and 15 Tableau dashboards presenting critical finance, customer and sales analytics. With a modern data architecture in place, Maravai LifeSciences is in a position to scale growth with real-time analytics and plans to add dashboards for product analytics, sales analytics, inventory analytics, and profit and loss analytics. Visit our Finance Analytics page for more resources on automating financial reporting with centralized, reliable data.

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About Slalom: Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. In 39 markets around the world, Slalom's teams have autonomy to move fast and do what's right. They are backed by regional innovation hubs, a global culture of collaboration, and partnerships with the world's top technology providers. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Slalom has organically grown to over 8,500 employees. Slalom has been named one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For five years running and is regularly recognized by employees as a best place to work.

‍About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.

‍About Snowflake: Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds. Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the Data Cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing.

‍About Tableau: Tableau helps people see and understand their data. The Tableau platform provides the breadth and depth of capabilities that enterprises need, and adapts to your environment with unmatched flexibility and choice, while meeting the toughest governance and security requirements. People love using Tableau because it is both powerful and intuitive. Tableau leads the industry with the most passionate user community, over 86,000 customer accounts, and a commitment to customer-focused innovation.