Teeing Up Success with Lightspeed Commerce

The Vision

To go above and beyond for its customers, Lightspeed wanted to revolutionize its external analytics platform. The vision was to replace their legacy analytics system with a modern, reliable, and user-friendly platform that could significantly increase data trust and enable faster business decisions for its golf club clients.

The Challenge

However, Lightspeed faced critical challenges in scaling its analytics offering with the existing infrastructure. This included:

1. Performance: The previous analytics system was slow to load.
2. Unreliable Data Refresh: The core data refresh time was high, which reduced data reliability across all golf courses.
3. Critical Reporting Delays: Report generation for key insights could take up to five minutes, severely hampering the ability of golf clubs to react quickly and use the data to run their daily business operations.
4. Limited Feature Iteration: The old framework made it difficult to iterate quickly, slowing down the delivery of new features and product analytics tiers.

Lightspeed wanted to improve its data + analytics capabilities it provides to customers, using the latest Google Cloud and Looker technology. 

The Solution

To solve this, Datatonic collaborated with Lightspeed to configure and deploy a modern data platform built on Dataform and Looker for its external analytics use cases. The new platform was designed to be integrated directly into Lightspeed’s product offering. Key implementation components included:

• Platform Modernization: Migration from existing BI tool to a new data platform (Looker + Dataform), establishing a new, reliable foundation for their golf division’s analytics.
• Extensive Dashboard Development: Creation of dashboards for priority use cases such as Occupancy, Rounds reporting, Memberships, Packages, and Subscriptions.
• Localization and Currency Features: Implementation of localization features for French and dynamic currency functionality.
• Agile Framework: Establishment of an agile analytics-as-a-product framework, allowing feature iteration to occur in less than a day.

The Impact

The project delivered immediate, transformative value:

• Performance Improvements: With Dataform, analytics asset generation time was drastically reduced from five minutes to seconds. Core data refresh time was cut from seven hours to five minutes.
• Unlocked Analytical Flexibility: By using modelled data directly from the data warehouse, users are able to access powerful new ways of interacting with the data, including drill-downs to row-level data.
• Enhanced Reliability and Trust: The modernized platform embedded directly in the Lightspeed’s Golf application significantly increased data reliability and user trust across all golf courses.
• Increased User Adoption: The new platform immediately saw a 3X increase in daily users, resulting in 1200 unique users and 7000 dashboard runs in just the first three days

Additionally, the project established the foundation for scalability. Migration of business logic and reporting to the Google platform allows for version-controlled analytics development, meaning additional data sources to be easily added to the data estate and new features can be developed with minimal development overhead.

“Working with Datatonic has been incredibly easy. From the start of our engagement they slotted right into our existing team of engineers and our ways of working. They helped shape the solution and have proven to be flexible partners every step of the way.” – Dylan Trebels, Senior Product Manager

By partnering with Datatonic to implement a modern Looker platform, Lightspeed Commerce successfully resolved its scalability and performance challenges. The new, fully embedded reporting suite offers drill-down capabilities, leading to high adoption and positive user feedback. The project has established a clear future path for a new revenue stream through product analytics tiers and represents a major milestone with plans to expand the solution beyond the golf division to other parts of the Lightspeed organization.