ALHO Group has stood for industrial, modular construction since 1967. With around 1,200 employees, the owner-managed company plans and builds turnkey buildings for education, healthcare, housing and offices, faster and more predictably than conventional construction. ALHO is now applying that same standard of efficiency and reliability to its own data: the company is developing from a traditionally managed operation into a data-driven and, in time, AI-supported organization. It starts with a central data platform that ALHO built together with Lakesights.
The challenge
As a group with several companies, ALHO worked with data from different systems that did not consistently come together. A consolidated view across the group companies was barely possible, and group-wide reporting could only be produced with a lot of manual effort. The result: analyses tied up capacity in IT and in the business teams instead of speeding up decisions.
ALHO therefore needed a central data foundation that harmonizes data from different sources and makes it directly available to the business teams for analysis: reliable, traceable and without the detour through manual preparation.
The solution: put data to work for the whole organization
Together with Lakesights, ALHO built a Databricks-native data platform and is integrating the group’s core system landscape into it. Through the Lakesights App, business users access consolidated dashboards, ask specific questions in natural language and get reliable answers straight from the company data, with no technical background needed.
In concrete terms, the platform gives ALHO:
- A consolidated data foundation: data from different systems is harmonized and made available group-wide in one place.
- Self-service for the business teams: consolidated dashboards and natural-language queries bring analyses to where the business questions arise.
- A Databricks-native architecture: the platform builds directly on the Databricks ecosystem and stays open and scalable for further sources and use cases.
- A foundation for AI: the harmonized data foundation is the prerequisite for integrating AI into the group’s core processes in a targeted way.
The value
Speed and a partnership approach
In just three months, a production-ready platform was built through which the entire group manages its sales reporting centrally in the Lakesights App. What mattered was not the pace alone, but the reliability of the results: a clearly scoped first project that quickly delivered real value in day-to-day work.
“Working with Lakesights was highly professional, transparent and collaborative from the start. The speed of implementation and the consistently high quality of the results deserve particular mention. Lakesights understood our requirements quickly and implemented them in a consistently customer-oriented way.”
Christoph Schlaug, Head of Business Applications & Innovation, ALHO Group
Data skills in the business teams
With the platform, the business teams analyze their data on their own and make decisions on a reliable basis. Data-driven work thus leaves the narrow circle of IT and becomes part of the whole organization. That is the basis for setting up further use cases in a scalable way.
“The Lakesights platform enables our business teams to analyze data on their own and make well-founded decisions. This lifts data-driven work out of IT and into the whole organization and creates the basis for scalable use cases.”
Michael Henze, Head of Digital Transformation, ALHO Group
A foundation for the AI strategy
On the basis of that first success, ALHO decided on a group-wide rollout of the platform as a central part of its digitalization and AI strategy. The consolidated, harmonized data foundation creates the conditions for embedding AI into the group’s core processes in a targeted way.
“Working with Lakesights is an essential building block of our digital transformation: we are developing from a traditionally managed company into a data-driven and, in time, AI-driven organization. The platform connects our systems, puts data to work and creates the basis for integrating AI into our core processes in a targeted way.”
Michael Henze, Head of Digital Transformation, ALHO Group
Outlook
With the sales integration as a first step, the direction is set: further systems and use cases on the same platform, a group-wide rollout and the gradual use of AI in the core processes. ALHO is building on a foundation that grows with its requirements, from consolidated reporting to running the group in a consistently data-driven way.
About ALHO Group
- Industry
- Modular construction
- Founded
- 1967
- Headquarters
- Friesenhagen, Germany
- Employees
- around 1,200 in Germany and Europe
- Structure
- Owner-managed group with several companies
- Services
- Turnkey modular buildings for education, healthcare, housing and offices, from schools and daycare centers to hospitals and administrative buildings