Unified View of Data Operations for Better Analytics and Insights

FCP Euro is an e-commerce company focused on the automotive aftermarket. The company sells car parts to owners of European-made vehicles such as BMWs, Mercedes and Volvos. Data is extremely important to FCP Euro – it’s part of everything the company does. The business uses data to give its customers the right product at the right time at the right price.

This case study, based on an interview with Brandon Harris, vice president of data and technology at FCP Euro, explores the reasons behind FCP Euro’s adoption of Revefi and the impressive results that followed.

The Lowdown

FCP Euro was struggling to understand its data operations. The company knew it needed to re-platform its data to create more capabilities for analytics and insights for its business users.

The company chose Revefi to:

• get a unified view of its data operations
• see how much time and cost it was investing in those operations
• understand whether there were data operations problems that it should address

The Deep Dive

The roadblocks

Before adopting Revefi, FCP Euro:

• was grappling with disparate data environments – including platforms on AWS, locally hosted databases and older data warehouses – that were not well connected
• had difficulty getting a complete picture of how these different pieces played together
• would need to do analysis all over again whenever something changed

The specifics

Now – with Revefi – FCP Euro benefits from:

• Granular, accurate understanding: Revefi goes across a wide range of different operational systems and "provides a lot of great insight right off the bat,” Harris notes. That empowers FCP Euro to understand its data platforms more granularly and accurately, Harris adds, which is a difficult and costly thing to do manually.

• Detailed information on how teams consume data: With Revefi on top of curated business-ready data sets, FCP Euro can see how teams consume data and where they might be missing certain fields or certain values that could add additional insight for their users. That allows FCP Euro to understand what its teams need from a data perspective so that the company can focus its energy and investment on delivering that.

• Better insight into cost management: FCP Euro consumes Snowflake with credits. Now, with Revefi, FCP Euro has the ability to understand how many credits it’s consuming for every single transformation and where it might have opportunities to reduce its spend.

• Easy-to-understand data quality alerts: Revefi’s data feed is one of the first things FCP Euro’s engineers look at in the morning. It quickly surfaces potential data quality and operational issues. This makes it easy for FCP Euro to understand what’s happening.

• Data governance: Revefi is extremely powerful, providing oversight of all the data. With Revefi, FCP Euro can see data flowing from point A to point B, and understand what those operations are, how long they're taking and how much they cost. Harris comments:

• Zero-touch platform: Getting on Revefi was painless. FCP Euro was up and running within 30 minutes of signing up for the platform, allowing it to access its data quickly and extremely easily. The company was excited by this ease considering how challenging it typically is to spin up new environments and create new systems and integration points.

• A great team, and a great product: Harris says that it is clear that Revefi was built by a team that understands data engineering. He adds that in addition to getting a great platform from Revefi, customers like FCP Euro are also getting a great partnership.

The Outcome

Revefi’s powerful solution helps FCP Euro see its internal operations, understand where there could be efficiencies, and look across usage patterns to see how people are consuming data.

For example, Revefi helped identify a transformation that was creating an excess of data loads on Snowflake. An inventory table with a few million records was getting loaded multiple times a day, and FCP Euro didn't realize how much that cost. Revefi quickly pinpointed the problem and provided a solution for reducing it. That saved FCP Euro roughly 5% on its Snowflake bill.

FCP Euro also creates historical snapshots of its transactional data, and that's traditionally very expensive, both in compute and in platform credits. Revefi helped it identify these scenarios and formulate strategies that enabled FCP Euro to reduce execution time by about 30%.

And within the first day of implementing Revefi, FCP Euro was seeing the results of its data warehouses flow through and was able to act on potential problem spots that Revefi identified.