BraunAbility unifies and activates data to power customer 360 and AI

Founded in 1972 by inventor Ralph Braun, BraunAbility is the world’s leading manufacturer of wheelchair-accessible vehicles, wheelchair lifts, and mobility solutions. Operating across 6 continents and serving more than 1 million people, the company spans several business lines, including mobility retail operations, vehicle conversions, and wheelchair restraint systems.

Rapid growth through acquisitions left BraunAbility with customer and operational data spread across multiple ERP systems and Salesforce instances. This fragmentation made it difficult for teams to maintain a single source of truth, limiting visibility into customer relationships, account performance, and overall business operations. As a result, analyzing data across the organization became complex and time-consuming.

Even more challenging was the process of making this data accessible to revenue teams in their systems of record. BraunAbility previously tried to tackle this task by utilizing custom API connectors, SSIS packages, and manual workflows to move data from their data warehouse back into Salesforce. But these proved difficult to maintain and scale, requiring engineers to manually intervene, troubleshoot, and fix broken pipelines.

BraunAbility’s goal was not simply centralizing data — it was operationalizing it. The company needed a scalable, cloud-native way to unify data from across the business, enrich it in Snowflake, and activate it back into Salesforce, so sales, service, and marketing teams could work from the same trusted data used for reporting, analytics, and AI.

Building a trusted data foundation with Fivetran, dbt, and Snowflake

To create a consistent data foundation across its businesses, BraunAbility adopted a data foundation built on Fivetran, dbt, and Snowflake.

Fivetran centralizes data from 12 ERP databases, 3 Salesforce environments, and several operational applications into Snowflake. This replaced a patchwork of custom API connectors and SSIS-dependent workflows with a scalable approach to data movement across BraunAbility's global businesses. 

Once ingested, BraunAbility uses dbt to standardize, harmonize, and enrich data from multiple business units, creating consistent data products for reporting, analytics, AI, and operational workflows.

Snowflake serves as the company's central source of truth, allowing teams to combine customer, operational, and business data from across the organization into a single governed platform. Using Snowflake, BraunAbility could handle growing data volumes without infrastructure management, run concurrent workloads for different teams, and manage sensitive customer data across business units. 

But centralizing data was only part of the objective. BraunAbility also needed to activate that data back into Salesforce, where sales, service, and marketing teams manage customer relationships, track account performance, and coordinate outreach.

The solution to operationalizing data from Snowflake was Fivetran Activations. Using its existing Fivetran environment, BraunAbility was able to activate modeled customer, account, and order data from Snowflake into Salesforce in less than 10 minutes — without custom code or complex configuration. Today, Fivetran Activations automatically synchronizes millions of records between the two platforms, keeping Salesforce up to date with near real-time data while built-in monitoring reduces downtime and manual intervention. By closing the loop between analytics and operations, BraunAbility gives sales, service, and marketing teams access to trusted customer insights where they already work.

The impact: Faster decisions powered by trusted data

With a trusted data foundation powered by Fivetran, BraunAbility has replaced manual updates, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems with a consistent view of customers, accounts, and performance across the business.

Business teams across the organization are already seeing the benefits of more accessible and actionable data:

• Sales, service, and marketing teams can better understand account performance, customer activity, and revenue opportunities by accessing trusted customer, account, and order data directly within Salesforce.
• Sales teams can track budget-versus-actual performance across thousands of customer accounts using current, harmonized data from multiple ERP systems.
• Revenue teams have replaced manual spreadsheet-driven processes with automated data flows, improving visibility into account performance and customer activity.
• IT and data teams can focus on higher-value initiatives by eliminating manual data integration maintenance.
• New acquisitions can be integrated into the company’s existing data architecture using repeatable governance standards and established processes.

“Fivetran and dbt give us a consistent way to bring data from multiple systems into Snowflake, standardize it, and create trusted data products for the business,” says Marty Goode, Associate Director of AI and Data Architecture at BraunAbility. “That foundation is what gives our teams the insights they need to serve customers more effectively and help us build the next generation of AI-driven experiences.”

BraunAbility is now extending this foundation into deeper customer 360, lead management, and AI initiatives. Future use cases include AI-assisted lead scoring, customer and lead harmonization, sentiment-driven customer engagement, and real-time customer 360 experiences powered by data from ERP systems, Salesforce, and connected vehicle platforms.

[CTA_MODULE]