Eaton Accelerates Project And Report Delivery

The big challenge was that Eaton has over eight million products in its catalog and nearly 110 divisions. They wanted a centralized, near-real-time, standardized view of their operational data to see how to better run the business. Because the company couldn’t consolidate its data, they couldn’t get a clear view of it in order to understand product distribution through their channel partners in a real-time way.

Eaton’s first pass at solving this problem was an architecture that they called a “conceptual ERP” — an attempt at one ERP system. But when the team had to make a change to the model, they had to go change all the business logic in the ETL. Figuring out where those changes in the data were made was almost impossible because different groups were doing different things in ETL. The localized data was totally gone, and the model couldn’t hold all of the local data that was needed. So business consumers were disappointed because the special fields that came from their ERP system, which helped them run their business and were very important to them, were gone.

Eaton’s data model was brittle, which they found challenging. It took more than two years to get their sales and orders data into a form where it was working, but then the first people who saw it still couldn’t find what they needed.

So the team stepped back, changed course and met with MarkLogic to discuss the Data Hub pattern. They were very cautious, going with a very simple architecture. They didn’t build a lot of infrastructure, but wanted to see if MarkLogic could do what they needed it to do.

The Eaton team took hydraulics and aerospace data for invoices, factored in a number of ERP variants and then added 50% to PoC time. They put their finger on the scale against MarkLogic because this was a new endeavor and a small team.

They also factored in the formality of processes that would take place at Eaton to make this “military grade.” Even after they did all that, they had a 4.2 to 1 acceleration using MarkLogic. Instead of the project taking two years, it took just six months!