“Fivetran is a very reliable solution. If you have an issue, you open a ticket, and someone takes care of it – and I don’t recall any times where we’ve had an issue that hasn’t been properly solved. It’s the most dependable solution among the ones I know on the market. That’s very valuable.”
Alejo Buxeres, Head of Data and Analytics, Wallbox
Key results
- Data unification enabling sharper, accelerated insights
- Automated high-quality reporting, enhancing operational efficiency
- Data intelligence, opening new business models and commercial opportunities
Data stack
Fivetran Connectors: dbt, Netsuite, Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, Jira, Apple and Google App Stores, Google, Facebook, Bing and LinkedIn Ads
Data Platform: Snowflake
Wallbox creates advanced electric vehicle charging and energy management systems. The company was launched in 2015 with the aim of changing the way the world uses energy. In just seven years, it has opened commercial offices around the world, grown to approximately 1,250 employees, and established four manufacturing centers on three continents: two in Barcelona, one in the US, and one in China. Currently its biggest market is between the US and Europe.
Initially focused on solving electric vehicle charging needs for domestic users, Wallbox has since diversified that market to include other user segments, including businesses and the public. At the same time, the company is transitioning from being solely product centered – interacting with customers only once through the sale of a ‘box’ – to selling a service, whereby it offers a charger monitoring and operation service with pre-established service-level agreements.
The challenge: Uniting data for greater insights
Since its launch in 2015, the growth of Wallbox has been meteoric – rocketing over the course of a two- or three-year period from 50 employees to more than 1,000. Along with its growth in size and personnel, the number of tools the company had in use also proliferated. In addition to core tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, each area of the business, from marketing to sales, finance to operations, had its own applications and solutions in use. For Wallbox, this disparate approach meant data silos that evaded insight, quality issues that were difficult to trace and resolve, and business logic embedded in the dashboard that was tricky to evolve. The challenge for this ambitious company lay in breaking those silos and bringing all its data together in a common location easily and cost-effectively.
“That’s where Fivetran fits very well,” says Alejo Buxeres, Head of Data and Analytics, Wallbox. “It’s a very reliable solution that with just a few clicks gets you up and running and allows integrating many different data sources.”
An additional challenge for Wallbox was that custom integrations were subject to and hindered by the regular updating of tools required to integrate services, making it a very costly exercise.
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The solution: Strengthening business through structured data management
For the integration, Wallbox evaluated several different providers. The appeal of Fivetran was that it offered the greatest reliability and had a very large number of connectors.
The company set about designing a modern data stack centered around a cloud data warehouse. It chose Snowflake for its corporate data warehouse and dbt as its modeling tool, enabling it to perform extract, load, transform (ELT) instead of the more classical ETL and therefore transform data within the data warehouse itself.
Overall, it helped the company have its first data platform up and running in just a few months and enabled growth in a more scalable way.
“Using Fivetran meant we didn’t have to hire and manage expensive data engineers.” says Buxeres. “Instead, we can focus on core business – understand the data, refine the data, and generate greater data sets so we can get the most value from them.”
The outcome: New business models and a faster time to insights
The ease of integration with Fivetran means that Wallbox now has between 30 and 40 data sources integrated, significantly increasing not only the volume but the value of the data in its warehouse. “If we had to develop the integrations by ourselves,” says Buxeres, “we might have only 10 data sources. And combining these sources generates even more value than having each of them independently.”
Between 2.5 and three billion rows of data a day are generated by the company’s chargers, which is then anonymized to avoid dealing with PII, giving Wallbox insight into, among other things, how the chargers are being used, at what time, and how much energy they’re providing to a car. For instance, the company recently released Eco-Smart, a feature where these insights can be leveraged during times when energy supply is higher than demand so that when a car is plugged in, Wallbox can transfer surplus solar energy into the car battery, to optimize the use of renewable energy.
Fivetran data insights are helping Wallbox move toward new partnerships and commercial agreements with energy companies, solar panel companies and utility companies, all of whom have an interest in sharing the company’s keen data intelligence.
Meanwhile the time to insight has been significantly reduced with implications across the Wallbox team. Where previously, finance had employed a complex ERP system with sluggish data analysis capacity that relied on tedious and error-prone manual input via Excel, the team now utilizes this through the warehouse and its BI tool. The result has been massive time savings and a reduction in human error.
Marketing has reaped the benefits, too. Its regular use of multiple, mainly ad platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Ads had again created numerous data silos and denied the team a holistic overview of spend and return. With Fivetran, Wallbox was easily able to set up integrations with these platforms and have for each of them an activity that refines data and another that unifies data in a single table, enabling the end user to see how each campaign has performed independently.
“It’s difficult sometimes to calculate the value of data,” says Buxeres. “But at the end of the day, data can help you increase your revenue, reduce costs, reduce risks, and generate new business models.”
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