Build a full data stack with one person

About SURI

SURI sells sustainable oral care products, including an electric toothbrush with a very long battery life. The company is four years old and sells through Shopify, Amazon and retail partners, with a vendor tool for almost every part of the business.

Forty data sources, and teams that could not see each other’s numbers

When SURI’s data lead joined a year ago as an analyst on the commercial team, the company had no data infrastructure. Its 40 data sources fed separate tools and spreadsheets, and the commercial team had no view of what marketing or growth were doing.

Fulfilment costs were estimates until finance closed the month, so nobody saw the real margin until weeks after the orders shipped.

SURI used its old reports as the test for every new metric

With Rig ingesting all 40 sources, the open question was trust. SURI’s data lead took the company’s existing dashboards and mapped the business logic behind every definition. Each metric Rig built was compared with the same number in the old reporting, and only metrics within an agreed error margin went to a person for review.

That turned metric sign-off into a short meeting with finance.

One person, the whole stack

Rig ingests SURI’s 40 sources, from Shopify and Amazon to its warehouses and ad platforms, into a warehouse SURI owns. SURI’s data lead models the metrics, certifies them and builds the reporting on top, from ingestion to the numbers the business reads.

The commercial, marketing and operations teams now work from the same definitions, and ask their own questions of them.

The checks found holes in the monthly tracker

SURI’s monthly tracker is the spreadsheet the whole company uses to follow revenue against targets. Comparing it with the new metrics showed SKUs missing their cost of goods, and costs folded into revenue where they did not belong.

Finance could fix the tracker before those errors reached another month’s numbers.

Warehouse invoices checked against every order

SURI receives six invoices a month from its warehouses and freight forwarders, and consolidating them by hand took an hour or two every week. Now Rig ingests them, matches each line to the Shopify order and the warehouse’s rate card, and flags any overcharge. A workflow drafts the rebate request to the warehouse.

In a first spot check, charges that should have been £51 had been billed at £71. With fulfilment costs matched to orders as they arrive, SURI reads its P&L every week.