At a Glance

Aliaxis, a global leader in the manufacture and distribution of plumbing and water solutions, sought a modern data catalog to govern, and enhance the value of, their global data platform. Choosing Atlan, Aliaxis has launched an organization-wide business glossary catering to the unique needs of both global and regional stakeholders. Their team has since used this newfound visibility into their data estate to reduce time spent on root cause and impact analysis by as much as 95%.

With more than 15,000 employees in over 40 countries, Aliaxis is a global leader in the manufacturing and distribution of water management solutions for building, infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural applications. Committed to the highest standards for quality, and mindful of the environmental impact of their products and their application, Aliaxis is an organization for whom data is indispensable.

Enhancing the Data Platform with Atlan

In the two years since the Aliaxis Data Platform was launched, Nestor’s team has grown from two to five, supporting global projects and regional needs. Crucial to their success is close attention to business needs and responsible management of costs.

At the core of the Aliaxis Data Platform is Snowflake as their data warehouse and data lake, Azure Data Factory as their ingestion and orchestration engine, dbt for transformations, and Power BI for visualization.

True to their philosophy of investing only when necessary, Nestor and his team recognized the need for a modern data catalog early on, but waited until the needs of their colleagues and data consumers justified an evaluation.

Conducting a thorough evaluation of the market, Nestor and his team prioritized solutions with strong integrations with their data stack, particularly Snowflake, dbt, and Power BI, and a user-friendly experience to ensure broad adoption.

Building a Global and Regional Glossary

Choosing Atlan as their modern data catalog, Nestor and his team quickly got to work provisioning access and integrating with their data platform. With Atlan integrated with key technologies like Snowflake and Power BI, and their data assets crawled and visible, Nestor and his team determined which assets they would define and at what depth, began structuring their glossary, and prepared for their first cohort of users.

Reflecting their support for both global and regional needs, Nestor and his team manage their data in a single Snowflake data warehouse, then separate it into each region, who are responsible for owning their data. Sitting atop these regional owners are Nestor and the data platform team, who support the sharing of data across regions, and maintain visibility into the complete picture of their data estate.

Automating and Accelerating Impact and Root Cause Analysis

Furthering their use of automated lineage, Nestor and his team have transformed time-consuming, manual processes for impact and root cause analysis into near-instantaneous visibility into downstream and upstream dependencies.

Recalling an example of this time-consuming effort, Nestor highlighted a data product owner in Aliaxis’ New Zealand region who documented their assets in a spreadsheet, including transformations in source-to-target sheets.

Beyond the time and effort saved from maintaining static documentation, using Atlan to determine column-level lineage represented an hour or more of savings for each data owner, sometimes several times per week, as analyses were needed.

A Technical and Cultural Transformation

Reflecting on the data platform team’s journey with Atlan, Nestor neatly summarizes the organization-wide benefit: Focus.

Moving forward, Nestor and his team consider their data platform as a “living organism”, constantly evolving to meet the unique needs of both Aliaxis’ regional and global data teams and consumers. Of particular interest are upcoming enhancements to Atlan supporting Data Mesh, a concept that aligns well with their federated model of regional data products meeting their global data platform and diverse end user personas.

And beyond the value Nestor and his team are creating with Atlan, the Aliaxis Data Platform, in a short period of time, has already affected not just a technological, but cultural shift, bridging the gap between producers and consumers, and laying the foundations for a world-class data capability.