Enterprise Data Strategy, Architecture and Optimization.

Hesch Consulting LLC is a highly specialized data engineering practice. Startups, mid-market, Fortune 500s — and the providers that serve them — bring Hesch Consulting in for the work that has to be done right the first time: platform architecture, performance optimization, and migrations that hold up five years out.

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13+Years in practice

40+Projects delivered

22+Clients & Partners

12+Industries served

75%Contract renewal rate

Selected clients and delivery partners

Services

Some of the ways we can help.

Engagements are tightly scoped and scale as needed. Services highlighted below include descriptions of work we have actually delivered.

Strategy & Architecture

Target-state architecture for cloud data platforms, aligned with corporate priorities, and focused on business outcomes.

Vendor evaluations, team structures, development cadence and DataOps that deliver.

Risk mitigation, quality assurance, and clearly defined ROI metrics to ensure value is realized and sustained on-time and under budget.

Life sciences R&D startup funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, running a proteomics research program in Parkinson's Disease. Alkahest outgrew the file-based infrastructure on its on-prem R server and engaged Hesch Consulting to lead strategy, architecture and optimization for a scalable Snowflake platform.

DevOps. Deployed a tiered Snowflake development landscape, integrated Bitbucket with Snowflake's internal repo, and built a custom deployment pipeline after identifying critical gaps in leading open source IaC/DaC solutions (Terraform, Pulumi).
Delivery. Established a formal SDLC, a RACI chart for solution delivery, and Jira as the delivery system of record — recovering thousands of hours of engineering capacity as the research program scaled.
Architecture. Introduced a hybrid Databricks/Snowflake architecture with loosely coupled separation of concerns, a medallion architecture for data pipelines, and structured data modeling approach to each layer across tens of terabytes of data.

UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center

Selected over Palantir

RS21, a data science firm in Albuquerque, was bidding on a multi-year informatics platform for the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center. Without an in-house data engineering capability, Hesch Consulting was brought in as a services partner to architect the enterprise data warehouse underpinning the platform.

Defined requirements across EHR/EMR systems, cancer registries, and large-scale semi-structured multi-omic datasets. Then drafted a cloud-native architecture built for scale, flexibility, resilience and governance.
UNMCCC selected the proposed architecture over COTS market leaders including Palantir. RS21 retained Hesch Consulting to run vendor evaluation, selection and staffing.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse was chosen and Hesch Consulting hired the implementation team. Five years in, the precision medicine platform we architected, procured and staffed is now live.

Optimization

Full stack cost and performance optimization evaluated against vendors, infrastructure, compute and storage.

True total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis across CapEx vs. OpEx, hidden costs, opportunity costs and risk.

End-to-end performance optimization against storage architecture, compute patterns, query latency headaches and concurrency bottlenecks.

240x faster · 1 hour → 15 seconds

A multi-year financial transformation program hinged on replatforming complex data models and pipelines from a legacy system onto a leading cloud data platform. Disney's service provider inherited a critical hierarchy loading job that was expected to run in minutes but was taking an hour. Hesch Consulting was then brought in as performance optimization experts to resolve the bottleneck.

Used platform-native graph engine capabilities inside a custom map-reduce orchestration layer to reduce ETL runtime from one hour to 15 seconds.
Simplified codebase by 10x, from 40 imperative logic source code files to 4 declarative ones, with matching gains in maintainability.
The same approach was later deployed at a major oil & gas client and became the basis of Hesch Consulting's open-source hierarchy flattener.

Implementation & Migration

End-to-end delivery from vendor selection through requirements gathering to production deployments.

Data modeling, data pipelines, data governance, observability, semantic layers and BI.

Hands-on leadership of on-site, on-shore, near-shore and off-shore teams.

Two-week extracts → real-time

Bridgestone's data science team spent the majority of its time requesting, waiting for, and ingesting data rather than analyzing it. Extracts were requested individually from multiple source system teams, often 2+ weeks out, unharmonized and unmodeled.

Engaged by Bridgestone's service provider to lead architecture, delivery, testing and deployment of a fully automated and high performance in-memory data warehouse.
Delivered real-time ingestion, cleansing and modeling across SAP, JDA and bespoke Teradata customer database source systems.
Returned 80% of data science capacity to analysis.

8x model simplification

As part of Deloitte's global SWIFT financial transformation program, Deloitte Federal was redesigning its internal time and expense application, DTE. Hesch Consulting was hired to develop and deploy the corresponding data marts required for federal government compliance reporting. Hesch Consulting architected the solution, led a team of 8 across on-shore and off-shore resources, ultimately delivering all ten reporting solutions on-budget and 3 weeks early.

Delivered an 8x simplification by evolving the originally scoped operational analytics models to conformed slowly-changing dimensional model.
Engagement was renewed twice, with five architects deployed across SWIFT projects, two of whom remained engaged for ten years.

Advisory & Audit

Expert second opinions when risk runs high. Independent platform audits, 3rd party architecture review, program management and gap analysis, competitive positioning and red-team evaluation of proposals and strategy.

$258M contract secured

Dataminr, a leading AI platform for real-time risk intelligence, was pursuing a $258M contract with the US Air Force. Hesch Consulting was hired to join a highly tactical red team evaluating Dataminr's proposal against competing open-source and COTS intelligence technologies, ran a detailed SWOT analysis, and repositioned Dataminr's differentiated value proposition.

Dataminr submitted the leading proposal and won the contract.

50% platform cost reduction

NetApp had procured SAP HANA for internal enterprise analytics. After several months of internal implementation, NetApp sought outside expertise on what was then a net new platform — targeting cost, memory consumption, and engineering practice. NetApp's service provider hired Hesch Consulting to address these concerns as a market-leading expert on the SAP HANA platform.

Identified 50% cost savings by targeting inefficient ETL memory consumption — the cost driver under SAP's in-memory pricing model.
Delivered an 80-page best practices guide and runbook written specifically for NetApp's IT organization, covering engineering practice, DevOps, governance and observability.

Staff Augmentation

Expert sourcing, vetting and placement of senior technical talent across data, software and AI engineering.

Candidates sourced and vetted by technical experts - not recruiters nor salespeople.

Risk is mitigated and value maximized via C2C and C2H staffing solutions.

25x content cost reduction

HealthStream, a publicly traded HealthTech company, offers a comprehensive learning management system for healthcare organizations and their providers. Keeping its platform content current demanded significant time from highly credentialed and costly medical SMEs. HealthStream engaged Hesch Consulting to source a GenAI specialist who could automate the respective content development workflows.

Hesch Consulting sourced, vetted and placed an ex-Amazon Software Engineer who was extended twice.
GenAI automation reduced content development cost by a factor of 25x at comparable quality, validated through comprehensive evals, also allowing in-house medical experts to re-focus their attention on the work that matters most - improving patient outcomes.

5 architects placed · 10+ year tenures

Following the implementation work on Deloitte Federal time & expense data marts, Hesch Consulting was contracted to staff 5 total Data Architect roles across the wider SWIFT financial transformation program.

Placed five data architects across multiple program initiatives.
Two remain engaged more than ten years later.

How we work

Three conversations before any work starts.

We partner early to ensure we're the right fit for your needs. If we're not, we'll do our best to connect you with who is.

Discovery

We start with the problem statement, we dig into root cause, and we identify what happens if the problem remains unsolved. We then sanity check timing, resources, alternative solution paths, and advise on the best next step.

45–60 minutes · No cost

Scope

Discovery then informs a project plan. What gets built, in what order. Infrastructure, technology, datasets, analytics. The work plan gets sequenced, resourcing planned, success criteria identified, and risks and assumptions captured.

Written scope · No cost

Confirmation

Final alignment on deliverables, timelines, team structure, and SDLC. ROI is forecasted and tracked. Procurement and onboarding processes complete and then the work begins.

MSA & SOW · Then delivery

About us

Practitioner led. Technology agnostic. Focused on outcomes.

Hesch Consulting was founded by Jody Hesch in 2013 after identifying a market need for expert services in enterprise data platforms. Nominated as an SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer, Jody has spent the past decade and a half driving measurable enterprise value through the implementation of highly scalable data platforms at clients and industries ranging from life sciences startups to publicly traded healthtech companies. He regularly contributes to the data engineering community through open source solutions, thought leadership, and community talks on entrepreneurship and data engineering.

SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer, nominated by the SAP Community Network.
Consulted for clients across USA, Canada, Mexico and Germany.
BS, Applied Math + BBA, Information Systems, magna cum laude, University of New Mexico.
Congressionally funded CBYX fellow in Germany.
Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Contact

Reach out.

Send us a note describing your challenges and we'll respond within one business day.

contact@heschconsulting.com

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