Managing a property can be a difficult task and if something goes wrong, finding a contractor to fix the issue at a reasonable cost can be a tiresome experience. This is where Plentific rises to the challenge. Founded in 2013, a pioneer in optimising property operations in real-time via its AI-powered software-as-a-service platform, in adapting to demand. Plentific connects owners, operators, service providers, and residents in a single easy-to-use platform. It streamlines operations, unlocks efficiencies, and delivers a world-class resident experience. This is especially a boon for large associations who manage multiple properties through this AI enabled solution to streamline their complex operations.
Recommending the right contractor at the right price involves training the ML models that power the underlying algorithm. As such, data plays a critical role in orchestrating the entire data backed decision engine. Holding reins of this process is a cross-functional team of approximately 10 folks comprising Data and ML/AI Engineers, Analysts, a Product Manager and the participation of backend engineers. The data team is led by Raúl Avilés Poblador. One of the key members of the team, Senior Data Engineer Carlos Olivet Garnica has collaborated as well in crafting this case study. This team's focus is to maintain the data infrastructure to power ML/AI models, maintain external and internal analytics dashboards to track various aspects of business performance. The infrastructure includes all the data pipelines.
Plentific’s Data Stack at a glance
Plentific’s data stack has been carefully designed to augment operational efficiencies and executive decision making for the customers and internal teams. Using the data mainly residing in the production database (PostgreSQL), dashboards and reports are created on dbt + Looker BI for internal and external consumption. Customers monitor the entire lifecycle of jobs (job requests, quotes, fulfillment, invoicing etc) and also consume Executive reports to track key metrics. Internally, dashboards are in place for Executives at Plentific to understand performance on their KPIs (customers acquired, SLA performance etc). Within individual teams, Product managers use dashboards to track key features usage and product adoption. Netsuite connector enables creation of Finance dashboards for the team to undertake billings and payment analysis. Relevant data undergoes transformation via dbt before being pushed into Snowflake as the central data repository
Overcoming Data Challenges
As is with every organisation, things weren’t as smooth during early days of Plentific. They were without a warehouse and without any ELT solution. This meant that the Data team had to compete with other users for compute and resources at peak times since everyone was querying into the production database. It became imperative to decouple these two loads by moving data from the database to a warehouse where the Data team can query the data separately .This is where the need to overhaul the data stack was felt and the search for a reliable ELT solution was initiated.
Search for an Ideal ELT Solution
While looking for an ELT solution, Plentific’s team was very clear with the decision criteria. Since they service customers in Europe, the solution had to be GDPR compliant with a server hosted in Europe. Another criterion was to support log based replication in databases since this reduces the need for competing for DB resources. Other important requirements were pipeline edit log, failure alert mechanism via Slack / email, ability to support required connectors and flexibility on ingestion and loading times.
After evaluating multiple tools like Fivetran, Stitch, Airbyte etc, their search came to an end after checking out Hevo. Hevo’s low code interface was something that really excited the Plentific team. Since there were non-technical users with data needs, it enabled them to create pipelines as per their requirements. Additionally, Hevo satisfied all the requirements which were key to selection of an ELT solution. The cherry on top was the cost-efficient nature of the solution that Hevo offered compared to other options available in the market.
Reaping benefits of onboarding Hevo
Plentific’s decision to select Hevo has helped them to reap various benefits in their journey of data management:
Reduced Data Latency: Hevo has helped Plentific reduce data latency time by a whopping 800%. In their own words, the Plentific team was particularly impressed with this development.
Hevo's log based replication helped us reduce data latency from 3 hours to 20 minutes. This means data in Snowflake can be almost immediately up-to-date, supporting more timely analytics and decision-making
Increased Operational Efficiency: Estimated time to implement a new table into pipelines has been reduced from 3 hours to a few minutes. Earlier it required to go from development through QA and finally deployment. This has opened bandwidth by ~450 man-hours annually which is now invested in collaborating with other teams to add value to platforms via new features
Improved Data Quality: Error rate of 1.5% due to manual data handling has been reduced to nearly 0%, significantly improving data accuracy and reliability. Even the few instances where errors happen were quickly handled thanks to Hevo Support and communication capabilities via webhooks to tools like Slack
Hevo has been a great addition to the overall data stack of Plentific which is widely acknowledged by the Plentific team:
One of our clients complimented us saying that “Advanced analytics is one of the best features Plentific has ever built” since this is the lens through which you analyze your business by evaluating various data points in almost real time. Without this you could see individual data points in silos but what matters is to see an overview. And this is what Hevo enables us to do, to serve our customers in the most competent manner
Next for Plentific
Plentific is on its journey of rapid growth and foresees a lot of products and features being rolled out in the near future. In this frenetic pace of growth, they see their partnership with Hevo critical, to enable data backed decision making process by tracking insights related to product adoption and roll out
Excited to see Hevo in action and understand how a modern data stack can help your business grow? Sign up for our 14-day free trial or register for a personalized demo with our product expert.
