Engel & Völkers uses Fivetran to complement its analytics platform, gaining real-time operational insights

 Key results:

• Integrate new data sources 4x times faster with Fivetran
• Within only 6 months there was more than a 100% increase in employees using Tableau reports, partially due to availability of additional data sources integrated with Fivetran
• Productivity increase thanks to real-time insights across all teams using Jira & Freshdesk
• Optimized marketing ROI across digital channels

Background:

• Industry: Real Estate
• Company Size: 16,000+ 
• Departments supported: Marketing, Product Engineering  
• Sources: Google Drive, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube, Jira, Freshdesk, Hubspot
• Destination: Google BigQuery‍
• BI Tool: Tableau
• Data Transformation Tool: dbt
• Use cases: Operational insights, Self-serve analytics and marketing optimization

For over 40 years, Engel & Völkers has been an esteemed broker of premium residential property and commercial real estate as well as yachts and aircrafts. With over 16,000 employees in more than 30 countries, the company specialized on sales and leaseholds of luxurious properties along with consultancy services. Competence, exclusivity, and passion are the core company values – increasingly fueled by data analytics. 

Fivetran enabled faster data integration and contributed to wider adoption of self-service analytics in the organization.

The data engineering team was overwhelmed with requests made by various company departments related to integration of various data sources. In order to respond to these queries the team often had to create custom solutions. This process is very resource-intensive, so requests had to be prioritized and in many cases the team was unable to respond to the growing number of requests. 

For this reason, Engel & Völkers were looking for a tool to reduce the effort required to integrate new data sources. “Fivetran solved exactly our pain points and allowed us to save a lot of data engineering time and effort. That is really a big advantage for us,” said Ivan Serezhkin, Global Head of Data at Engel & Völkers. “And it is super simple to use.”

Engel & Völkers' most valuable asset: data based insights

The first Fivetran connectors were set up within a few days. “If our data team had to build them, it would have taken us at least four times as long – it wouldn’t even have been possible with the existing team as the overhead would have been too high and certain projects would have been deprioritized” said Serezhkin. Today, Engel & Völkers relies on over 15 Fivetran connectors, “but there are definitely more to come,” he added. 

Engel & Völkers deploys Fivetran mainly for three use cases:

• IT Operations Insights – “Probably one of the most interesting use cases,” said Serezhkin. The main data source here is the project management ticketing system Jira. With detailed real-time insights, Engel & Völkers can answer questions like “How much time does it take to assign and to resolve a ticket by team?” or “How many story points are assigned and handled per developer and their squad?” This ultimately enables the company to measure the performance of all teams and projects and therefore to optimize its resource allocation and improve the team’s productivity.
• Self-service analytics: Local teams around the globe can manage data ingestion themselves by simply adding csv-files to a Google Drive folder. Google Drive automatically synchronizes with the data warehouse, so all data is available and ready for analytics in Tableau. By empowering employees from all departments to conduct analysis independently they can answer the questions that arise in their day-to-day work faster and more precisely and make data-driven decisions.
• Marketing optimization: At least six different marketing channels are integrated into the data warehouse. This enables the marketing team to perform much more elaborate real-time analytics, e. g., click-through-rates resulting in more efficient marketing and significantly optimized marketing ROI.

In the last six months the number of employees using Tableau reports to make data-backed decisions in their daily work has doubled from 250 to around 500 and the number continues to grow on a daily basis. Ivan Serezhkin is certain of the reason why: “Fivetran contributed to our ability to deliver on a wider range of use-cases, because we now have more data sources to produce more business insights and value.”