How Fresh Water Systems Saved Thousands with Lightning Fast Analytics

The Company

South Carolina based Fresh Water Systems is a leader in water filters, water filtration, purification and treatment. The company offers thousands of water treatment products by top manufacturers. Fresh Water Systems was founded over 25 years ago, but the company recently modernized and amplified its data management capabilities.

The Challenge

John Wessel is the Director of IT and Data Manager at Fresh Water Systems and he led the implementation of a cloud data management platform at the company. Before Fresh Water Systems implemented a cloud data warehousing solution, its data was managed using a legacy system that was inflexible and inefficient, making new integrations and connections to other data sources tedious, complex and resource-intensive. As Fresh Water Systems has grown, the amount of data and platforms they leverage has increased. The company needed a data warehouse that would adapt and grow with them into the future.

The Solution

Wessel helped spearhead the project to modernize the company’s data management. He analyzed the current systems and determined its data infrastructure needs. Wessel described the company’s ideal data stack,

We wanted something fully hosted, columnar and we preferred Panoply because it’s built on top of very innovative technology.

- John Wessel, Director of IT & Data Manager

When implementing Panoply, Wessel immediately noticed its speed and ease of use. Of the setup process, he shared,

Once I started using Panoply, I added data sources and the data was pulled in and made accessible within minutes….I realized I had to do zero ETL. That was HUGE.

In addition to Panoply, Fresh Water Systems also implemented Stitch Data for additional ETL which opened up many data sources for easy access. Throughout its data management, the company uses many of Panoply’s native data connectors.

The Results

For Fresh Water Systems, the benefits of implementing a cloud data warehouse solution include time-savings, resource management, and data democratization. Now that Fresh Water Systems operates on a cloud-based data management solution, the company has reduced its IT team from 7 to 3 employees, according to Wessel.

We don’t need a DBA or a networking engineer. We have strategic partners now such as Panoply and have saved many costs and long-term headaches.

The company has also been able to access its ecommerce data seamlessly. Fresh Water Systems utilizes Shopify, and with a few clicks, the business was able to access its data for immediate querying and analysis. Wessel added, "I easily saved two months of work with a single data integration alone"

For business intelligence and self-serve BI, Fresh Water Systems has Mode Analytics in place. Wessel reports that Panoply saves him $14,000 per year because he no longer has to buy an add-on caching layer to his BI stack.

But most importantly, by implementing Panoply, Fresh Water Systems is getting better use out of their data. The company’s marketing department is able to access data easily and frequently for KPI monitoring and reports. Company executives have even begun exploring data because it is now so much more accessible and accurate.

Panoply gathers all your data in one place and gets you lightning fast analytics.