Lyka is on a mission to change dogs' lives through real food nutrition. To power that mission, they’ve built a fast-scaling, data-driven operation in Australia spanning everything from supply chain and manufacturing to growth, lifecycle marketing, and finance. As the business has grown, so has their need for access to reliable data. But previously, Lyka’s data & analytics team was chasing their tails to get their combination of two BI tools — a legacy visualization tool and SQL runner — to keep up.
By migrating to Omni, Lyka’s data & analytics team eliminated clunky, technical UIs as barriers to entry and enabled a culture of self-service that helps every team to access and use data in their day-to-day work. Their modernized data stack with Omni on top of Snowflake and dbt helps business teams move fast and work from a shared source of truth – without sacrificing governance.
Results #
Improved self-service access across the company — enabling manufacturing and supply chain, growth and lifecycle marketing, finance, commercial operations, and more to answer their own questions and move faster
Customized, on-brand dashboards built by business users help teams make faster, more informed decisions
Seamless governance between Omni and dbt reduces manual work for the data team, enabling them to maintain clean, production-grade models in dbt while tailoring data exploration and minimizing complexity for business users
Increased data adoption with “Data Dog Park”, an internal Omni training program that drives cross-functional alignment by empowering employees across departments to build, analyze, and collaborate using shared metrics
Lyka's Data Stack #
The Challenge #
Lyka’s growth depends on data flowing across the entire business— driving supply through manufacturing and logistics, and fueling demand through growth and marketing.
When Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst, joined the data & analytics team in 2022, the company had initially set up a legacy visualization tool for executive dashboards and a simple SQL runner for ad-hoc analysis. For a while, these tools were sufficient. But as the company grew and the business became more complex, they were too fragmented and inaccessible to meet most users’ needs, and adoption plateaued.
“Our legacy BI tool felt clunky and wasn’t a friendly tool for business users; it slowed down self-service data discovery. Our SQL runner was faster for folks who knew SQL, but its reporting and visualization capabilities were limited, and it couldn’t support our enterprise-level dashboards. We needed a single platform that enabled ad-hoc analysis and dashboard creation without requiring SQL proficiency.”Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst
The Evaluation #
Ready to move off both tools, the data & analytics team set out to evaluate alternatives, including Omni, Looker, Sigma, Lightdash, and Hex.
During their POCs, the data team dogfooded three key use cases:
Enabling ad-hoc data discovery and analysis
Building their headline KPI dashboard
Running a cohort retention analysis
After seeing how fast and easy Omni made these use cases, the data & analytics team was bought in. They also engaged cross-functional stakeholders to ensure that the rest of the organization found it easy to use. During their initial evaluations, business users were already comfortable creating their own dashboards – a clear upgrade in self-service from their previous setup.
“We made our minds up pretty fast — it was quickly clear that Omni met all of our needs. In addition to the product, what stood out from the beginning was the support from the Omni team. We knew we would get whatever help we needed to migrate and get Omni off the ground. There was no looking back after that.”Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst
The Migration #
Lyka’s migration to Omni presented an opportunity to clean up their data estate and rebuild their data stack on modern architecture.
To migrate their dashboards and reports, the team prioritized “Tier 1” dashboards, then paused to see what content people actually missed. In 3 months, they were able to rebuild all their core reporting in Omni.
“We didn’t want to waste time migrating dashboards no one used,” Andrew said. “It gave us space to focus on building new, more impactful things in Omni.”
Anticipating increased data usage, the team also migrated from BigQuery to Snowflake. Snowflake’s performance, separation between storage and compute, and integration with the other platforms like Fivetran and Hightouch made it the right long-term partner for them. During their database migration, Omni’s change management features, like the git integration and content validator, helped alleviate risks by providing visibility into dependencies and preventing accidental breakage.
“As data adoption increased, migrating to Snowflake helped us effectively manage our cloud costs and create an enterprise-level data setup. Switching to Omni and Snowflake ultimately became a data platform migration that opened up data access across the organization.”Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst
The Impact #
Self-service data across the company #
Users across every team have found their favorite features within Omni. Andrew shared a few of his favorite examples:
The data team loves Topics because they can curate datasets for business users to confidently explore: “Omni’s Topics feature made a huge difference early on. The ability to organize views into curated datasets with the right fields, filters, and context for each audience helped the team reduce clutter while making it easier for business users to explore safely.”
Business users are feeling more confident analyzing data with the intuitive point-and-click UI: “I was comfortable in SQL, but Omni showed me and the team how much easier and faster things could be in the UI. It totally changed my perspective and makes it so much more accessible to business users.”
Spreadsheet-savvy users still get to use their favorite formulas and analysis techniques, but they can now build on top of live data: “Our senior commercial manager can join company targets to live dashboards using native functions such as XLOOKUP in Omni. That’s the level of empowerment we wanted.”
Customizable dashboards bring Lyka’s brand to life #
Lyka’s fresh, friendly brand is core to how they engage with customers, and it’s also infused into everything the team does internally. With dashboard theming and custom markdown, their users get to unleash their creativity to build beautiful, engaging dashboards, including:
The Email Engagement dashboard, built by Venus Vitchayayotin on the lifecycle marketing team, which helps the team understand optimize customer communications
The NPS Overview dashboard, built by Chris Oidem on the data & analytics team, which highlights real-time feedback from their “pet parents”
The Real-Time Intraday Growth dashboard, built by the data & analytics team, which provides visibility into progress toward goals by the hour
The Company KPIs dashboard, built by the data & analytics team, which creates a single source of truth for the company’s most important metrics
“Omni’s dashboarding capabilities impressed us from the start with how easy it was to whip up a dashboard. And we love using the custom theming options to make it pretty; our team loves great design. It’s a marked change from what our business users could do in our previous tool.”Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst
Keeping Omni and dbt in sync #
Lyka uses dbt to maintain clean, production-grade models. Omni’s semantic layer gives them an interim prototyping layer that sits closer to the business, where they can apply additional context, define metrics, and tailor experiences for different teams – without changing the core models.
“Omni’s dbt integration helps us keep our dbt model clean while adding more nuance in the BI layer. I like having both, especially since we can manage changes between them with git,” Andrew described.
Improving data adoption with internal training #
Every 6 months, the data & analytics team leads a cohort of new hires (and other interested team members) through “Data Dog Park”, where they spend a few hours per week watching Omni training videos.
As weekly “homework”, they develop a dashboard or workbook relevant to their domain, then come together to share what they’ve built. What started as a training exercise often turns into something bigger — an unexpected forum for cross-functional collaboration. In one recent cohort, team members from sustainability, manufacturing, and finance all shared what they created in Omni. Most importantly, these users take those skills beyond the training and into the functions they join, breeding a culture of self-service throughout the company.
“Enabling people with data is a core priority for our team, and selecting Omni as our BI platform has made company-wide adoption a reality. It’s helped us empower the business and transform our team from a ticket-taking function to a strategic business partner.”Andrew Lewinsky, Senior Data Analyst
Looking ahead, the team is exploring ways to leverage Omni’s AI to get even more business users querying data. Andrew is particularly keen to add context from their dbt models and semantic layer to Omni’s AI assistant, giving users context on how metrics are defined and making sure AI answers accurately reflect their business. With more teams using data than ever, the whole company is paws-itively excited to keep evolving their offering — staying steps ahead of the pack.