Chick-fil-A improves speed toinsight with ThoughtSpot and AWS
Executive Summary
As part of rebuilding its analytics journey on a modern stack, Chick-fil-A
invested in Amazon Redshift and Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3). Yet, many of the company’s data analysts were still
fulfilling numerous requests for data from the business rather thananalyzing data to improve business outcomes. To address this issue,
Chick-fil-A turned to ThoughtSpot. With ThoughtSpot, business users
easily search and analyze data, which allows them to make better
decisions and frees up Chick-fil-A’s analysts to focus on adding value.
Taking a bite out of data search—with scalability
Although Chick-fil-A had been making serious inroads into modernizing
its analytics stack, many of its business and data analysts were still
spending their time as “data gophers.” Chick-fil-A estimated that theirdata searches resulted in a loss of 100,000 hours of productivity in 2019.
Chick-fil-A knew there were several tools in the industry that offered data
search capabilities. They decided to partner with ThoughtSpot as asolution because of its unique ability to process such large quantities ofdata without having to resort to averaging or waiting for data sync andingestion times.
“It was an easy decision for us to go with ThoughtSpot, which enables
people to find data as if they were Googling it.”—Callie Cobbs, Senior
Lead Analyst, Enterprise Analytics, Chick-fil-A
To the supply chain and beyond
Chick-fil-A decided to start small and roll out ThoughtSpot one businessgroup at a time. Chick-fil-A already invested significant amounts ofmoney and time to build a Supply Chain Data Mart with Amazon
Redshift, centralizing data, and cleaning it up. Chick-fil-A’s goal was toimplement a better way of exposing that supply chain data to end users.
The first use case was onboarding business users to uncover insights on
their own without having to ask analysts for help which had previously
been impossible. Business users were suddenly able to not just view
invoices for different products but also answer their “next question” ondelivery information for products, case quantities, and more.

About Chick-fil-A
Headquartered in Atlanta,
Georgia, Chick-fil-A is one of
the largest American fastfood restaurant chains,specializing in fast andefficient chicken sandwich
ordering and delivery.
CHALLENGE
Chick-fil-A’s Enterprise
Analytics team wanted toget data into the hands ofend users at the speed ofbusiness for ad hoc dataneeds.
SOLUTION
ThoughtSpot makes it easy
for all Chick-fil-A end
business users to search data
and uncover the insights
needed to adapt quickly tobusiness changes.
RESULTS• Improved data visibility• End users answer questionsvs. relying on analysts• Moved business processfrom monthly to daily aftereliminating exporting andmanually combining data
• Analysts can focus on
higher value-add analytics• Key component of legacy
tool retirement

Moving and loading data from Redshift to ThoughtSpot
Chick-fil-A used Alteryx’s custom ThoughtSpot connector to move supply
chain data from Redshift to ThoughtSpot. “We had all this supply chain
data that we'd spent some time curating and was already in Amazon
Redshift. With Alteryx, we quickly took what we’d done in Redshift andused the custom connectors to schedule workflows to write the data toThoughtSpot,” said Callie Cobbs, Senior Lead Analyst at Chick-fil-A.
This solution also enabled Chick-fil-A to schedule the data loading at afrequency dictated by the data, a capability that helped overcome asubstantial hurdle. “There was a table that didn't have a primary key.
Finding the records to update was a challenge,” said Cobbs. However, withthe connector and Alteryx, the team was able to do a delete and rewrite
for a specific period to make sure all the changes were captured. “It kept
the integrity of that data,” added Cobbs.
A major timesaver for analysts“ThoughtSpot makes it easy
to connect to data where itsits, freeing up data analysts
to focus on adding value, notdata prep.”Callie Cobbs, Senior LeadAnalyst, Enterprise Analytics,
Chick-fil-A

Before ThoughtSpot, analysts had a tracker full of requests from thebusiness. “It could take 3–8 days to come back with a response,” said
Cobbs. Since implementing this combination of Redshift, Amazon S3, andThoughtSpot, Chick-fil-A analysts now train their users to go toThoughtSpot to find information.
“The analysts push users to ThoughtSpot, telling them they can findanswers there. When we bring in transactional data, we’ll have 20,000users.”—Callie Cobbs, Senior Lead Analyst, Enterprise Analytics, Chickfil-A

About ThoughtSpot
The world’s most innovative enterprises use ThoughtSpot toempower every person in their organization, from C-suite executive
to front-line employees to quickly uncover data-driven insights.
ThoughtSpot combines a search-engine-like interface with an AIdriven analytics engine, to make finding anomaly and patternmatching as simple as it can be.
Find ThoughtSpot solutions in the AWS Marketplace.