“Integrate.io is a state-of-the-art tool with state-of-the-art connections and is extremely flexible, scalable and easy to work with”
Bill Heffelfinger
PMP Head Of Client Technology Solutions, Cloudfactory
About
CloudFactory is a global leader in combining people and technology to provide a cloud workforce solution for machine learning data enrichment.
Use Case
Like every high-growth enterprise, CloudFactory was determined to maximize the productivity and quality of its workforce. To do so, they needed to pull together external data from their clients as well as integrating internal data that showed how quickly and effectively employees were working.
As things stood, the data they needed was scattered across disparate sources, making it manually intensive to consolidate and analyze accurately. They urgently needed a way to gather reliable data and then draw rich insights that could be used to improve capacity planning and team performance—and ensure they continued to deliver maximum value to every client.
Consolidating disparate performance data to enhance client delivery
CloudFactory knew that having reliable performance data was part of the lifeblood of running a great business. But before they implemented Integrate.io, it was a daily challenge.
The data they needed to pull together was located across multiple sources and silos, located both internally and externally.
Internally, they depended on manual and mundane processes to collect key data around employees’ throughput and quality. First, the workers themselves documented data—such as the time they’d spent on tasks—into Google sheets, saving them as a CSV file, before their team lead manually uploaded them through a UI. Naturally, this meant the data was wide open to the risk of human error.
Team leaders and analysts were then required to spend hours manually validating data, checking data fields and double-checking for accuracy.
Fleshing out the bigger performance picture from the client side was even more challenging. With a variety of clients all using different services to provide data to CloudFactory, from APIs, to CSV extracts, and GraphQL, huge chunks of engineering time were required to gather, transform and load it into the CloudFactory data warehouse. Only then could it be combined with other data to derive insights.
Even when data was successfully moved from source to database, there remained an element of uncertainty around its reliability, making it impossible to draw accurate and meaningful analysis.
CloudFactory urgently needed an ETL solution capable of automating their pipelines and simplifying data collection. One that provided a level of data quality that enabled better performance analysis, and would free up more of their people to focus on value-added tasks that would ultimately drive better client outcomes and continued growth.
“When I looked at our tool chest, there was absolutely nothing in it for ETL purposes. We were relying on manual processes to capture performance data, which weren’t verifiably accurate.”
Bill Heffelfinger
PMP Head Of Client Technology Solutions, Cloudfactory
CloudFactory integrates data from multiple sources using Integrate.io’s array of ready-to-go connectors
Bill assessed several options and quickly decided there was only one ETL platform for his business—Integrate.io.
It stood head and shoulders above competitors, not least because it had ready-made connectors for the vast ecosystem of apps and services CloudFactory needed to aggregate
data from.
Integrate.io’s hands-on, step-by-step support ensured integration was fast and seamless. First, Bill worked with an Integrate.io Sales Engineer who verified that Integrate.io could provide all the complex integration, transformation and functionality he required.
Once signed on as a client, a dedicated Success Engineer from Integrate.io stepped in to provide Bill with training, work with him and his team to create dataflows, and test them to ensure they met all the required standards.
This partner-focused support, combined with Integrate.io’s simple and easy to use interface, enabled Bill to go from zero automation to having an ETL tool to drive his client data pipelines, in just a couple of days.
Integrate.io’s attentive support continued long after the ‘sale’. Whenever Bill had a technical question, for example around a challenge with his incremental loads, Integrate.io responded immediately and provided a solution within 24 hours.
As CloudFactory began to use the platform, they saw so much to appreciate. They leveraged Integrate.io’s inbuilt REST API connector to seamlessly pull data from multiple clients and additional third-party REST APIs. The industry-leading connector removed the need for CloudFactory’s analysts to program their own connectors, which otherwise would have been painstaking.
Thanks to Integrate.io’s transformation layer, CloudFactory could do any kind of data transformation at the click of a button—from simple joins to more complex filters. On the destination side, it was just as simple to reliably load all the transformed data into their Snowflake data warehouse.
Suddenly, CloudFactory had automated dataflows and multiple sources of data reliably aggregated. None of which would have been simple and repeatable without Integrate.io’s connectors and transformation capabilities.
So far, they’ve moved eight of their largest clients to the automated pipelines using Integrate.io. Within that, they're seamlessly consolidating 28 different external data feeds.
With performance data now integrated into a common destination, analysts and decision makers can draw timely, value-boosting insights. They can plan staffing more efficiently, and identify those employees who have the magic combination of great throughput and quality output—and use that to drive best practice across their teams.
“Our assigned Success Engineer has been spectacular to work with. We’ve also leveraged the Integrate.io support widget, which has some really smart and energized team members who are responsive and always do the right thing for their clients.”
Bill Heffelfinger
PMP Head Of Client Technology Solutions, Cloudfactory
Improved data quality, hours of saved time, and a more productive workforce
With their newfound capability to create reliable client pipelines, where data is pulled, transformed and loaded automatically, CloudFactory no longer wastes valuable time manually validating and tracking data.
Bill anecdotally knows that this has cut numerous hours from team leaders’ and analysts’ workloads every week, giving them valuable time back to invest in growth-focused priorities. With data quality improved—and so much easier to visualize and leverage on the backend—analysts are drawing richer, value-boosting insights around team performance, which enables better capacity planning and drives up quality across the team. As a result, client projects are delivered faster and better than before, and clients’ dollars can go even further.
With Integrate.io’s ability to source data from anywhere, deliver any complexity of transformation, and load data to their destination(s) with ease, the platform ticks every box for CloudFactory.
Furthermore, Bill hugely appreciates the ‘spectacular’ level of support he gets from Integrate.io. His Success Engineer feels like an extended part of his team and he’s thrilled he swapped manual frustrations for automated peace of mind with Integrate.io.
“The teams that have embraced our automated client data pipelines, compliments of Integrate.io, no longer have to waste time manually capturing and tracking data. And you know, that’s a beautiful thing. Integrate.io is a state-of-the-art tool with state-of-the-art connections and is extremely flexible, scalable and easy to work with.”
Bill Heffelfinger
PMP Head Of Client Technology Solutions, Cloudfactory