Legacy Data Warehouse to BigQuery: Real-Time Analytics for 200M+ Records
Logistics & Supply Chain
What They Were Facing
TransGlobal's legacy on-premise data warehouse was hitting capacity limits with 200M+ shipment records, overnight ETL jobs running 14 hours, and analysts waiting until noon for yesterday's data. The BI team maintained 400+ reports in an ageing Cognos installation, with no self-service capability. Real-time visibility into shipment status, fleet utilisation, and supply chain disruptions was impossible, leaving operations teams reactive instead of proactive.
How We Solved It
We migrated the entire analytics platform to Google Cloud. BigQuery serves as the central data warehouse with Dataflow streaming pipelines ingesting real-time data from IoT sensors on 2,000 vehicles, warehouse management systems, and Salesforce CRM. We built a Looker Studio dashboard suite replacing all 400 Cognos reports with interactive, self-service analytics. Vertex AI predictive models forecast delivery delays 6 hours in advance, triggering automated rerouting workflows. Historical data migration of 200M+ records was completed with zero downtime using a parallel load architecture.
The Impact
Streaming pipelines replaced overnight batch ETL, delivering real-time analytics with sub-minute data latency for operational dashboards.
Complex analytical queries that took 45 minutes on the legacy warehouse now complete in under 8 seconds on BigQuery's columnar architecture.
Vertex AI models predict delivery delays 6 hours in advance with 91% accuracy, enabling proactive customer communication and rerouting.
Self-service Looker dashboards increased active analytics users from 40 power users to 240+ across operations, sales, and executive teams.
“We used to make decisions based on yesterday's data — and that was on a good day. Now our operations centre has a real-time view of every shipment, every truck, every warehouse. When a port delay happens in Shanghai, our system predicts the downstream impact and starts rerouting before our competitors even know there is a problem. Moving to BigQuery was the best infrastructure decision we have made in a decade.”
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