Norwood is a global outdoor equipment company and a leading designer and manufacturer of portable sawmills. Norwood's mission is to empower resourceful people everywhere to build their best futures through wood and their natural environment.
In 1993, Norwood introduced the world to the first affordable portable sawmill: the original LumberMate. This marked a turning point, opening a world of opportunities for outdoorsmen, craftsmen, hard-working families, hobbyists, and professional sawyers.
Today, Norwood continues to lead the sawmill revolution. With over 75 patents—more than the rest of the global industry combined—Norwood’s equipment is hard at work in over 100 countries worldwide. Thousands of sawyers trust Norwood to unlock the value in their trees and their natural environment: to build, to craft, and to make their mark.
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Norwood recognized significant untapped potential within its data—potential that could drive revenue growth and operational efficiency through advanced analytics solutions. However, its data was fragmented across multiple sources, making it difficult to harness. Additionally, Norwood was hesitant to invest in a large internal analytics team without first validating the impact of key analytics initiatives, such as management dashboards and machine learning models capable of accurately predicting customer interest and behavior.
The Challenge
Norwood partnered with Data SEA Consulting to provide the technical expertise and resources needed to build a robust data program.
Data SEA Consulting worked closely with Norwood to assess and select a Lakehouse vendor that could serve as the company’s central source of truth. After evaluating options, Databricks on AWS emerged as the ideal solution. Data SEA then implemented data pipelines to ingest, clean, and model data from over 15 critical sources, enabling seamless access to information.
With its data centralized in Databricks, Norwood developed a suite of powerful analytics solutions, including interactive Tableau dashboards and machine learning models. These models provided highly accurate predictions of customer behavior, allowing the sales team to prioritize high-potential leads—especially those genuinely interested in purchasing a sawmill—eliminating the inefficiencies of sifting through long lists of lukewarm prospects.
The Solution
With its new Data Lakehouse powering an initial set of analytics solutions, Norwood gained confidence in its data strategy and expanded its internal analytics capabilities by hiring dedicated analytics resources. With enablement support from Data SEA, these new hires leveraged the platform effectively, creating additional analytics solutions without concerns about data access or integration challenges.
Norwood’s analytics team continues to collaborate with Data SEA to develop increasingly sophisticated data products, with a strong pipeline of innovative solutions on the horizon.
The Results
“The Data SEA Consulting team has been a valuable partner as Norwood has invested in its data & analytics program.
The Data SEA team was instrumental in helping Norwood transition to a powerful cloud-based Data Lake that helped break down data silos and provided a powerful platform for analysis. They also assisted us in building out a suite of intuitive Tableau dashboards that helped keep the entire organization on the same page and pushing in the same direction. The Data SEA team made sure that the Norwood team was set up to successfully utilize these powerful new analytics platforms independently to answer our own business questions.
Throughout the project, the Data SEA team was very attentive to our needs, presented information in a concise manner and worked well with members from the executive team and front-line analytics team alike.
I would highly recommend that other organization looking to step up their data & analytics consider working with Data SEA Consulting. We look forward to continuing to work with them in the future on impactful analytics solutions.”
Steve Elliot
Director of Business Systems