Nowcast Supports the Construction of FineToday's Next-Generation Data Analysis Platform

Nowcast Inc. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Hitoshi Tsujinaka), which aims to realize embedded finance through the provision of next-generation financial infrastructure, has supported FineToday Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Tetsuro Komori) in building a next-generation data analysis platform utilizing Snowflake and dbt to accelerate the company's company-wide data-driven management. This support has enabled FineToday to establish an environment for integrated management and utilization of core data such as supply chain and financial accounting.

■Background

FineToday is a personal care company that develops brands such as "TSUBAKI," "SENKA," and "uno." While promoting the utilization of data with the aim of optimizing the entire value chain from production to sales, the company faced the following challenges:

• Black-boxing and Siloed Data Pipelines

In the conventional data infrastructure, complex business logic was fixed within programs, and the data structure was not optimized for different analytical perspectives (dimensions). This required significant effort for data reuse, quality management, and modifications, hindering rapid data utilization.

• Lack of Data Governance

The absence of catalog functions to manage data location and definitions made it difficult for developers and users to access necessary data. Strengthening control over permission management and resource management for production and testing environments was also required.

• Need for Advanced Data Utilization

The conventional data infrastructure structure made it difficult to perform data analysis based on integrated and controlled indicators and analytical axes across the group and globally. Consequently, it could not be fully leveraged for strategic decision-making and policy planning. This hampered swift and flexible decision-making, limited cross-sectional and reusable data utilization, and made it difficult to achieve advanced analysis using AI models.

■Support Overview

Nowcast provided comprehensive support, not just system construction, but also from architecture design and implementation to the establishment of operational rules and skill transfer to in-house engineers.

1. Rebuilding Dimensional Models with Snowflake × dbt

By adopting Snowflake as the data warehouse (DWH) and dbt for data transformation, complex supply chain and financial data were rebuilt into dimensional models organized by business dimensions such as "product," "customer," and "time." This visualized complex processing logic on an SQL basis, creating an environment where anyone can handle data with the same definitions.

2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform and Enhanced Governance

Infrastructure settings for AWS and Snowflake were codified using Terraform (IaC: Infrastructure as Code). This enabled automated environment construction and prevention of configuration errors, while also allowing for strict permission management and audit log tracking, meeting enterprise-level requirements.