FELFEL speeds up data integration by 20x with Fivetran

Founded in 2014, Swiss-based startup FELFEL is on a mission to revolutionize the way employees spend their lunch breaks. It offers a smart fridge that provides more than 200 products from quick lunches to midday snacks — refilled daily according to employees’ preferences. 

Today, 700 CEOs trust FELFEL, and the company has delivered over a 20% increase in employee engagement for its customers. In 2017, FELFEL won the Swiss Economic Forum’s "Best Start-up Award" and was selected as a “High Potential Startup” in 2018.

Fresh data is needed for fresh meals 

FELFEL's business model is based on data-driven deliveries to each customer on a daily basis. As the number of customers grew, so did the demand for information. Internal stakeholders wanted insights into things such as the number of orders per customer, busiest days and times for orders and more, so that they could more accurately predict how to track and replenish inventory. FELFEL had to manually replicate and merge data, which took the data analytics and engineering team weeks to complete and ultimately resulted in making decisions based on stale data.  

The business had a SQL server database running on Azure, with Tableau connected to the replica of the database. This setup was very limited in terms of performance, and there was no way to transform and connect data from different sources. 

A BI developer was hired to put together a new platform that would automate data integration, prioritize scalability, security and compliance, and support near real-time synchronization. It was clear that automated data movement had to be at the heart of the new data infrastructure. Key requirements were scalability, security and compliance as well as low cost of ownership. The solution also had to support near real-time synchronization. 

FELFEL chose Fivetran because it was easy to set up, fully automated and reliable. Fivetran’s breadth of connectors proved to be another plus as they needed pipelines set up quickly for Hubspot, Dropbox, Google Sheets, SurveyMonkey and Mail Team.

It took less than three days to set up Fivetran and the required connectors. "If we had to create the four connectors ourselves, it would have taken us at least two months," says Rubén Coll, Senior Data Analyst, FELFEL.

For the first time, FELFEL gained transparency into the current and historical inventory of its main warehouse and customers’ refrigerators. Inventory data is automatically synchronized with Snowflake every 30 minutes. By aggregating data from all sources, Fivetran enabled the company to analyze all orders from both B2B and B2C customers, including the employees of FELFEL's customers. This enabled FELFEL to perform revenue management based on the performance of each customer and product and to create tailored promotions.

FELFEL also looks at the sales figures of the products and the menu, so that each customer's fridge contains the right products at the right time. By integrating data from SurveyMonkey, FELFEL can now track the satisfaction of the final consumers at any point in time.

"The data is now much richer, with more attributes available than before,” Coll says. “I spend 99% of my time on tasks that add value to the business and only 1% on ingesting new sources. Without Fivetran, I would have to spend about 70% of my time on data engineering, leaving only 30% for valuable tasks."  

Centralized data facilitates collaboration

Data is centralized in Snowflake. The business units work closely together to create more intelligence around the data. The data team supports the business units by building reference dashboards and giving employees access to the data sources they need to run analytics and build all the dashboards they need.

FELFEL is currently modernizing its marketing analytics practice. The company plans to use HubSpot as the source of truth for all customers by using all its capabilities to its full extent, including ticketing for B2B and B2C support. This will open up a range of new analytical possibilities, enabling FELFEL to see the whole picture with every touchpoint in the customer journey — from the first point of contact until today.

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