Ovako, a Stockholm-based engineering steel manufacturer with about 3,000 employees, is replacing an undocumented legacy data warehouse with Timextender Data Integration and Snowflake. Small warehouse changes that used to take hours to make safely now take minutes.
Company Overview
Ovako is a European manufacturer of engineering steel, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with about 3,000 employees and production sites in Sweden, Finland, France, and Italy. The company makes bars, tubes, rings, and pre-components for the bearing, transportation, and manufacturing industries, in applications that range from automotive and hydraulics to mining. Ovako has been part of Japan's Sanyo Special Steel since 2019. Its BI and Integration team owns the company's data warehouse.
Challenge
Ovako's data warehouse had grown over many years into a tangle of stored procedures, SSIS packages, and undocumented transformation logic, with no formal change management process behind it. Tracing where a single data point came from, and how it had been transformed along the way, could take hours of investigation. Even small changes took hours to make safely, and larger ones often needed workarounds built only to avoid breaking something downstream, which buried more hidden logic in a system that was already hard to read.
Much of the knowledge of how it all worked had left with the people who built it, so there was no documentation to fall back on, no record of past changes, and no reliable way to judge the impact of a change before making it. The warehouse still ran, but nobody on the team could fully explain how.
Solution
Ovako's BI and Integration team ran a structured evaluation of three platforms for automating warehouse development, testing each one against the team's own real-world requirements. Timextender Data Integration was the clear choice, both for its ease of use and for how well it adapted to Ovako's varied and complex data scenarios instead of forcing the team to work around its limits.
Ovako chose Snowflake at the same time to replace the legacy warehouse, and made the two decisions together, with Timextender's native Snowflake integration a significant factor in validating both. The team is now recreating the warehouse on Snowflake as metadata-driven pipelines in Timextender Data Integration, which replaces hand-written stored procedures and SSIS packages with logic that is documented and traceable by design.
Results
The warehouse recreation is still underway, and Ovako is already seeing the difference in day-to-day development. Small changes that used to take hours to make safely now take minutes, because fragile, hidden logic has been replaced by a structured development process in which every change is documented and can be traced.
For the first time, the BI and Integration team can see exactly how its data is sourced and transformed, and it has a repeatable process for changing it. Ovako expects these gains to build as more of the warehouse moves onto Snowflake.
Timextender
