Lori

Lori, based in Nairobi, Kenya, offers a logistics coordination platform that connects cargo owners to transportation providers across Africa. Its online marketplace provides long-haul transport solutions to manage people, processes, and technology.

Senior Data Scientist Jefferson Sankara says the company "had data on key systems like customer relationships, order origination and management, and accounting, but we lacked a way of efficiently piping the data to our BI environment for analytics. We tried manual approaches like exporting data from applications and importing to the BI tool, then we built data pipelines in house to address the issue. Both approaches were expensive and not scalable. It took a lot of time and it would have required a full-time engineer to manage the work. Developing a basic integration for one application would take at least two weeks of an engineer's time, costing around $3,300 per month, and the solution would not be mature and scalable enough incase the application changed.

"We thought a cloud-based data pipeline might be a better choice. We knew Stitch was being used by other companies. We got a free subscription and set up replication jobs. Within a couple of days we had all the data we needed from key applications being piped to the warehouse. Today we continue to use Stitch for our data engineering needs even as we increase our application stack."

Sankara says, "Stitch is a mature application and was very much capable of addressing our problems. It has integrations for a good number of SaaS platforms and databases and it also allows one to build custom integrations using the open source Singer platform. We built one for a CRM platform that we use, and the team at Stitch was very cooperative in deploying it to the ecosystem and promptly responded and effected any changes we made as they came up."