Case Study: HNI Corporation achieves faster data pipelines and real-time supply-chain insights with Ascend.io

How Hni Drives Manufacturing Digital Transformation With Data Pipelines

HNI Corporation, a $2.2B workplace furnishings and residential building products company with 8,500 employees, set out to accelerate its cloud journey to Microsoft Azure and refactor supply-chain and ordering data to support a shift from seasonal bulk orders to customized orders. The data science team needed a native Azure solution that scaled, minimized cross-functional dependencies, and reduced time-to-pipeline so they could focus on business logic — prompting the selection of Ascend.io and its data pipeline platform.

Ascend.io was deployed inside HNI’s Azure subscription to ingest ERP and operational data into the Azure data lake, run transformation pipelines, and expose results via a fast API feeding Power BI and dashboards. With Ascend.io, HNI can launch pipelines in hours, cut time-to-value (bringing projects to production in ~2 months versus ~5+ months), enable near-real-time order and supply-chain analytics, and provide capacity planners actionable insights to adjust production and shipping.

HNI Corporation

Tom Kozlowski

Vice President Decision Science