Safety io

Safety io, based in Berlin and Pittsburgh, provides its customers with software services that help them protect their workers in some of the most formidable environments in the world. The company is a subsidiary of MSA The Safety Company, a century-old manufacturer of safety products that protect people and facility infrastructures. While MSA concentrates on hardware, Safety io's mission focuses around software.

Data Strategy Manager Tim Speicher comprises the entire data team at the company. He says the company first found Stitch when it was looking to build dashboards to visualize their sales pipeline. "NetSuite reporting is lacking in this way, so our financial analyst was extracting data in spreadsheets and building visuals using Excel and PowerPoint. Additionally, MSA uses SAP as their CRM and ERP system and I wanted a way to pull data from both SAP and NetSuite. Because most of our infrastructure is already in AWS, we chose to use Amazon Redshift as the data warehouse destination. Our parent company uses Power BI for reporting, so it made sense for me to use that also.

"Once I decided on the data warehouse and reporting components, I needed to extract data from NetSuite in an automated way and load it into Redshift so Power BI could access it. I chose Stitch because I liked Stitch's approach to data transformation and loading. Stitch replicates all of the NetSuite data from the tables that I select. I was able to pull NetSuite data into Redshift relatively pain-free."

"Stitch not only gives us analytics data quickly; it also saves people time. Before we signed up for Stitch our financial planner was spending 2–3 hours per week manually extracting data from NetSuite and building financial presentations. Now our business dashboard is updated daily without human interaction.

"A longer-term benefit that we'll soon realize is that we'll be leveraging Redshift to help control access to our services. Since NetSuite is the source of truth regarding actual sales, the copy of the data in Redshift will allow us to control access to our services without needing to utilize the NetSuite API."

Speicher had complimentary things to say about Stitch's support team. "I leaned on the online chat support many times during the initial Stitch implementation. The support team was always helpful and was able to point me to useful resources."

Looking ahead, he says, "I'm trying to pull NetSuite 'messages' into our destination and working through some issues. With this data we plan to build more advanced dashboards to show trends or tone in customer communications. Additionally, we have plans to add a Marketo integration so that we can expand our view of the customer journey."