Challenge:
Aviation training company CAE USA needed to increase its data awareness throughout its organization.

Solution:
Domo gives CAE USA the ability to tie all its data together and govern it using defined security roles.

Impact:
Domo is now used throughout the organization to manage training, track projects, increase ETL speed, and more.

CAE USA sees insight take flight thanks to Domo.

As the largest aviation training company in the world, CAE is critical to ensuring that pilots have the skills and knowledge they need to fly safely. Located in Tampa, Florida, CAE USA is the largest segment of CAE’s Defense and Security business unit, focusing on managing all of the company’s contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and its allied military partners. The company not only designs and builds flight simulators for the world’s most complex, high-tech aircraft, but also provides complete classroom and in-flight training.

CAE USA first started using Domo to manage its business development process so sales and marketing teams could optimize their efforts. Then the finance department started using it to process forecasting, planning and reporting. Then the engineers got their hands on it.

“They let the tech people have access to it, and we went crazy,” said Dave Luna, senior technical specialist for data analytics at CAE USA. Luna switched over from his work as a systems engineer at CAE USA to focus on managing how the company leverages Domo. Today, the company has about 300 regular users, with 75 of those classified as power users.

The sky’s the limit.

While CAE USA initially implemented Domo as a sales and marketing tool nearly seven years ago, the company now leverages Domo across the organization to its fullest extent for initiatives like:

Securing data: By using Domo to create defined security roles, CAE USA can control user access, while metadata makes it easy to gain visibility into what data is being used and what can be discarded. “We have over two billion rows of data, and we can see that over half of it has never been accessed,” he said. “Not only that, but we have a lot of sensitive information that not everyone should have access to. The metadata — the data about the data we put in Domo – is critical to maintaining compliance.”

Managing training: CAE USA also uses Domo’s CourseBuilder training app to build out training materials that are customized to each user’s role. “I’ve connected it with Google Analytics to give us a sweet way of tracking who has done the training, their quiz scores, and who has passed or failed,” said Ashleigh Stevenson, data analyst at CAE USA. “Being able to keep a log of that in-house inside Domo is much easier than using an external training tracker.”

Improving project management: To ensure projects stay on track, Luna built dashboards that track engineering sprints by teams and projects. Using Domo to go back several years across multiple groups and hundreds of projects, he can provide engineering teams with the perspective they need to ensure projects stay on track. “We watch how the overall plan changes as sprints complete so we can predict what will happen as things move to the left or right,” Luna said. “When we see a problem, we’re able to call managers and say, ‘We see a problem coming up in the next two weeks with your workload.’ This lets them figure out how to adjust their plan and make it all fit.”

Tracking events: Meanwhile, Stevenson uses alerts to manage by exception. “We have training by role, so once I get an alert that they have completed the training material I can increase their access.” Alerts also tell her when there is a data flow that needs to be remapped. By managing by exception, she can proactively take action instead of waiting for a request for access or a help ticket.

Decreasing time to insight: Luna says that the CAE USA team continues to get better at Domo as new features are added. For example: “Using ETL 2.0, I took one flow that was running 21 hours and got it down to 17 minutes. Now the data set can run when the data gets updated, not once a day.”

Domo has helped completely transform CAE USA’s perspective around data. “We’ve learned that data awareness is a journey, not a destination,” Luna said.

“People are now data aware. They understand the value of data and they’re asking, ‘So what do we do next?’” said Luna. “We are victims of our own success because people have seen what we’re doing and ask for more all the time.”