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Fivetran > Case Studies > Fivetran and Snowflake Drive Business Agility for World Fuel Services

Fivetran and Snowflake Drive Business Agility for World Fuel Services

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Applicable Industries

Finance & Insurance
Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

The Challenge

World Fuel Services (WFS), a Fortune 150 company, faced significant challenges in managing and utilizing its data effectively. The company had grown through numerous acquisitions, each with its own client lists and data sources, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of customers across the entire organization. Additionally, the company's existing ETL pipelines pulled data in batches once a day into an on-premise Oracle database, which quickly became too large to run live queries effectively. The company also faced the challenge of managing data from dozens of ERP and billing information services across its subsidiaries, which was particularly critical during the global pandemic when the company needed to increase accounts receivable efforts to maintain revenue.

About The Customer

World Fuel Services (WFS) is a Fortune 150 company that markets, sells, and delivers fuel globally. The company has grown significantly over the past decade through more than a dozen acquisitions, each operating semi-independently with their own client lists. WFS deals with a volatile market, requiring real-time decision-making across the organization. This includes fuel brokers making large sales to capitalize on pricing dips, marketing teams launching or scaling campaigns in response to supply and demand changes, and optimizing delivery routes for drivers. With over $20 billion in annual revenue, data is a critical business driver for WFS, informing decisions that improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

The Solution

WFS decided to undergo a major digital transformation project, moving 22 data centers to the cloud and replacing the on-premise Oracle database with a cloud-based data warehouse. After evaluating several options, the company chose Snowflake for its ease of use and immense elastic scalability. However, the legacy ETL solution required significant effort to write custom ETL jobs for each table in Snowflake. To address this, WFS implemented Fivetran, a SaaS platform that automates data ingestion in real time. Fivetran pulls in data from dozens of sources, including Salesforce, Box, SQL, and Postgres databases, into Snowflake. The platform also handles change management throughout the data pipeline, ensuring continuous data ingestion without additional configuration, even when source schemas change.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Fivetran and Snowflake has significantly improved WFS's ability to manage and utilize its data. The company now has a global view of its customers, enabling it to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities across its subsidiaries and business units. During the global pandemic, WFS was able to increase its accounts receivable efforts by pulling data from disparate sources into a centralized database, providing a comprehensive view of money owed to the company. The automation provided by Fivetran has also saved significant time and effort, allowing both engineers and users to focus on more strategic projects that impact revenue. Furthermore, the real-time data ingestion has empowered stakeholders across the organization to make data-based decisions, improving customer experience and business operations.

Quantitative Benefit

Real-time business intelligence powered by up-to-date, consumable data
300,000 new leads generated from consolidated customer data and external sources
Visibility on millions of dollars in receivables that were previously hidden in data silos