For 50 years, Hubbardton Forge has been designing and building some of the most ornate and beautiful lighting fixtures and installations in the world. As an industry-defining powerhouse of artistic and technical skill, the team at Hubbardton Forge is committed to producing one-of-a-kind works of art. But delivering their breathtaking creations on time and getting deep insights into every step of the process was an immense data challenge. Hubbardton Forge turned to the team at Cause + Effect Strategy to get a handle on their volumes of intricate data and ultimately uncover insights that would help them take their business to the next level. Cause + Effect wrangled Hubbardton Forge’s stores of highly-specific data and helped channel it into detailed dashboards that allow them to understand where every project is, every step of the way — and that’s just the beginning.
Hubbardton Forge: Unique products, unique challenges
Founded in 1974 in Vermont, Hubbardton Forge has always been a special kind of company. With a focus on beautiful, artistic lighting, Hubbardton Forge has cultivated an industry-leading team of creators, a long list of dedicated clients, and a track record of providing world-class works of art on a fast, efficient timeline. Hubbardton Forge is also a leader in sustainable business practices, utilizing the latest technologies and processes to build the products their clients need while respecting the earth.
With a company as singular as Hubbardton Forge, the data challenges were bound to be unique as well. As Eric Hannon, Vice President of Information Technology at Hubbardton Forge shares, they realized they needed help getting a handle on their ever-growing data stores in 2022:
“We wanted to work with a trusted partner, who could understand our requirements and existing reporting and help us create self-service reports that would allow us to quickly answer the 2nd- and 3rd-order questions that we couldn’t easily answer before. Cause + Effect came as a highly recommended partner and through evaluations, conversations, and demonstrations, it became readily apparent that they could deliver on all our needs.”
It’s common for long-running companies like Hubbardton Forge to stick to processes that have worked in the past up until they hit a modern challenge and need to make some serious changes. When Hubbardton Forge reached out to Cause + Effect, they were storing their growing data pool on an Epicore on-premises SQL server and using an Adaptive database to calculate their “promise dates” for individual orders. Fabricating and shipping their unique products on time is a huge part of what makes Hubbardton Forge so beloved in the lighting and design industry, but the business logic to make sense of all their data and calculate these dates correctly was very complex.
“There were just so many layers of logic,” says Sidney Kung, a data analyst at Cause + Effect. “I had to work closely with Nate Carr, Hubbardton’s Chief of Staff, to get the logic out of his head to build the Promise Date dashboard.”
Communication and adaptability are two hallmarks of the approach that Cause + Effect brings to every client:
“It’s vitally important to get to know a client’s specific challenges before starting to build a solution,” says Cause + Effect President John Loury. “They weren’t sure that a BI tool would be able to handle their complicated workflow, but we took the time to understand what data they had, what they wanted to know, and how best we could present their insights — then we were able to build a solution that empowered them.”
Understanding a complex business
Another complicating factor for the Cause + Effect team was understanding Hubbardton Forge’s specific time-tracking conventions: Their work month starts on the 15th and they have a specific number of “working days” that they need to account for when planning delivery dates for each project. And all the data reporting that would help them optimize the process was originally done in Excel.
This is where Sidney and Laura (project manager) from Cause + Effect were able to empower the Hubbardton Forge team with more versatile tools. Once they understood Hubbardton Forge’s needs in detail and had unraveled some of the complex business logic, they were able to pipe the data into analytics platform Sisense to surface the insights. Laura and Sidney then incorporated Hubbardton Forge’s custom logic and business requirements into the data model (including their fiscal calendar and working days, as well as budget sheets for shipping and bookings).
“They had a lot of spreadsheets that someone would need to update manually on a regular basis,” said Laura. “We were able to create a way to automatically update these sheets as dashboards.”
These improvements started having a positive impact on the Hubbardton Forge team almost immediately and demonstrated the value that Cause + Effect brings to the table:
“Cause + Effect has been a great partner,” explains Eric. “They helped train us, built a robust data model, and set up baseline-level reporting to keep high-skill people from doing low-value work.”
The initial Cause + Effect engagement was aimed at surfacing details for Hubbardton Forge’s sales reports, but early wins led to bigger data challenges — and opportunities.
Iterating to succeed
Even with detailed input from the client — something every complex business intelligence deployment needs — there’s always a period of experimentation when the initial solution is delivered. Depending on their level of familiarity with the tools being provided, each client needs a different amount of training and hand-holding, but at some point clients need to start using these tools on their own. During this initial rollout, it’s common to come back to the team managing your business intelligence solution and ask them to make some adjustments — you may even find out that some element of what’s been provided flat-out doesn’t work as you need it to.
On Hubbardton Forge’s side, Eric’s ability to work directly with the their analytics platform made iterating on the initial solution extremely effective and collaborative:
“The Hubbardton Forge team is very knowledgeable about their data and challenges and processes,” says Sidney. “There’s a high level of mutual respect when it comes to working together, cutting through the surface level details and digging into the big challenges.”
While every client may not have the level of technical expertise that Hubbardton Forge does, the ability to communicate clearly and collaborate when attempting to solve complex data challenges is something that can benefit every working relationship. After every round of iteration, the Hubbardton Forge team would try out the latest improvements until new needs or refinements were uncovered, which the Cause + Effect team would tackle.
“Mapping the Hubbardton Forge calendar (with the working days) onto the traditional fiscal year calendar was challenging,” Laura recalls. “It kept breaking — Sidney dug into the complex logic and had lots of conversations with Eric and the Hubbardton Forge team until we got it to work.”
Two noteworthy accomplishments were the “Mitchell Report” dashboard and the Promise Date dashboard. The Mitchell Report started off as a very complicated Excel spreadsheet of shipment and invoice data, provided by Hubbardton Forge systems analyst Jason Mitchell (hence the report’s name). The Cause + Effect team transformed it into an efficient, automated dashboard. This milestone, John says, reinforced the value of the Cause + Effect team’s efforts.
The next major success, the Promise Date dashboard, took Hubbardton Forge’s understanding of their production timelines to the next level by allowing them to track the dates of completion and delivery for all their projects in one place. The Promise Date dashboard required the incorporation of a large amount of complex business logic in order to successfully deploy, but the results were worth it:
“Initially, we were processing the promise dates every two weeks or so, but that means we didn’t know if we were behind on something for two or even three weeks,” Eric explains. “Now, things are different — every day our VP of Operations can dig into when the orders came in and when they are going out. This allows the leadership team to understand when order flow is spiking, which new products are taking longer to develop. We can drill down into what’s causing delays and how long it might take to finish a project. This allows us to put the right resources behind the right projects and understand opportunities for improvement — we can also keep our clients apprised of delivery times if they change.”
Creating a brighter future with data insights
For Hubbardton Forge, rolling out data insights has unlocked a new understanding of their business, starting with the initial sales reporting, then growing into the Mitchell Report and Promise Data dashboards, and expanding into new projects. That’s a common occurrence, says the Cause + Effect team:
“We really try to build on past successes,” Sidney explains. “The more we work with a client, the more we build on our understanding of their business to help us think more creatively and help them solve more problems, often building more reports for different departments, beyond our original deployment.”
Once a partner like Cause + Effect gets a real sense for a client’s business needs and the data they collect (or could collect, if there was a use-case for it), it’s only natural that they start seeing more ways to help that client make better, data-informed business decisions. That’s the real promise of advanced analytics: Helping businesses do what they do better, with less work pulling insights out of vast datasets.
“What makes our team unique is that we don’t just have a technical focus, we also have a business focus,” John says. “And Hubbardton Forge is a great example of a business partnership where we are really able to understand the client’s needs and come up with insights that benefit them.”
Equipped with the insights and tools that the Cause + Effect team has built — and continues to expand upon — the team at Hubbardton Forge is confident of the value that analytics bring to their business. Says Nate Carr Chief of Staff at Hubbardton Forge:
“The challenges our business faces are always shifting; to be successful we need to adjust and adapt rapidly. We had developed strong guiding metrics as a business, but they were too slow and labor intensive — drilling into what was driving a problem or opportunity also took too long. The analytics deployment that Cause + Effect set up for us powerfully addressed both limitations. Information is fresher, trends more visible, and drilling into the details is intuitive and fast. I have always subscribed to the idea that ‘you get what you track.’ Cause + Effect helps us get there faster.”