Kraft Analytics Group Platform Evolution with Prefect

About KAGR (Kraft Analytics Group)

KAGR (Kraft Analytics Group) is a progressive technology and service company providing data management, advanced analytics, and strategic consulting services for the sports and entertainment industries. Whether leveraging its proprietary technology platform or partnering with its strategic consulting team, KAGR helps organizations become data-driven and use analytics to grow the bottom line.

KAGR is a team of the brightest minds in sports, entertainment, and technology focused on finding insights for their clients including global entities as well as the major six U.S. sports leagues, college athletics, and other key industry players. Through their platform, KAGR supports a wide variety of clients: teams who own their venues, others that do not, and, in some cases, large ownership groups that run multiple properties. Each client has their own business needs and systems in use. That means KAGR can’t rely on one-size-fits-all solutions.

Instead, they set out to build flexible integrations that can be configured to each customer’s unique setup — this includes KAGR’s platform and the orchestration behind it. That kind of complexity runs through every part of KAGR’s work. No two clients look alike, but the expectations are always the same: fast, reliable, accurate and secure data to drive business decisions and value.

With significant growth in their client base over the past few years, and with data availability and customer sources massively multiplying, KAGR outgrew some of the technology in their orchestration layer, a piece of KAGR’s much broader underlying tech stack. The KAGR team conducted a detailed RFP process led by Abe Weinograd, VP of Product & Technology, to evaluate the right potential partner to enable KAGR to build more flexible data ingest options to meet the increasing complex data sources and new systems entering the sports ecosystem.

KAGR Achieves Better Efficiency and Scalability using Prefect to Drive Real and Reliable Results

Recognizing the 100x growth in potential systems and more real-time data ingest needs, KAGR identified the need to have the right technology. The previous technology was heavier to manage and could require duplicative work.

KAGR wanted full control over orchestration. With Prefect, KAGR was able to build a more efficient product downstream. To make this work at scale, Prefect supported the workflows and configuration the team desired without the manual overhead. The biggest impact was the visibility into what was running, where failures happened, and why they occurred without additional instrumentation. This visibility enabled data-driven product enhancements and KAGR now has deeper observability into source system changes.

As KAGR continues to build reporting tools to monitor and adjust to real-time issues, the capabilities KAGR has created with Prefect have been a major asset. “Our pipeline success rate went up by at least 50 to 80 percent with the monitoring and processes we implemented enabled by Prefect’s flexibility and how we built our product around it,” Weinograd said.

Security and data privacy is a major focus for KAGR, with a priority on best-in-class security control to their clients. Prefect provides vehicles to maintain the strong boundaries for client workloads which KAGR requires and enabled the flexibility needed for KAGR to manage infrastructure the way they desire.

Prefect and KAGR’s partnership is ongoing and collaborative with a focus on continuous improvement.“When we had questions, Prefect was available to support with ideas of how to implement tools,” highlighted Weinograd, “That’s hugely valuable to us because our clients are in the hospitality and business of creating fandoms which is a 24/7, weekends and evenings experience.”

“In the sports industry, fan engagement and, therefore, our KAGR technology evolves rapidly, so we needed the ability to own the orchestration. Prefect enabled us to build what we wanted, how we wanted it, allowing us to be ahead of the data and system growth,” concluded Weinograd.

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