If you’re managing the process of data ingestion for your organization - for example, getting data from new customers onboarded to your platform – you’ll know that it can often be a time-consuming and frustrating process for all parties.
We often have companies approach us as they’re reaching a tipping point where a data ingestion process that requires a lot of manual work is bottlenecking growth.
If you need to:
- onboard more clients
- ingest and update data more often (and more reliably)
- deal with more complex data formats
- and reduce development effort
then it might be time to look at a more robust data ingestion tool.
Pain points that might indicate you need a data ingestion tool
1. You need to ingest data in multiple formats
You need incoming data to fit your format, but clients send data in multiple different formats, via multiple channels. You need a way to ingest whatever clients send you – without a whole load of manual work on your side.
2. You don’t want to ask your clients to reformat the data themselves
Some don’t have the technical resource to do it, it could cost them money, and there’s still likely to be errors that need rounds of back and forth to resolve. You want to give clients a data ingestion process that’s hassle-free and seamless, but without just doing all the manual work yourself.
3. There’s too much manual work involved, making it hard to scale
You’re signing up more clients, but because the data ingestion process needs a lot of manual work to convert files to your format, it’s taking too long – leading to data delays and slow client onboarding - and you don’t want to just keeping hiring more and more people to keep up with the workload.
4. Having to rely on an engineering team is causing a bottleneck
When technical teams need to be heavily involved in the data ingestion process, it can create delays in data onboarding. It can also lead to frustrating collaboration with implementation teams or customer specialists, who often know the data best, but aren’t technical enough to work with code.
5. You need to perform sometimes complex transformations and validations on the data
Sometimes more basic data importers can’t handle all your requirements, or leave you stuck with what comes out of the box and not able to customize your data ingestion process enough.
6. Error reporting is hard
If a data process fails, it can be hard to figure out exactly what the problem is and where it happened. And it can be even harder to communicate those errors to third parties so they can fix the data.
7. The process becomes unreliable as volumes grow
When you need to deal with larger data volumes, bigger files, or more frequent updates, existing processes can struggle to keep up. If data loads take days to process, or fail entirely, it can lead to critical issues with accuracy.
Automate your data ingestion with CloverDXIf any of these frustrations sound familiar, and you’re thinking about upgrading your data ingestion processes to be more automated and reliable, here are some key features that you should look for to solve those problems:
7 features your data ingestion tool should have to make your life easier
1. Be able to convert from any file
Manually processing incoming data in different formats is time-consuming and error-prone.
No matter what format you’re receiving data in, your data ingestion workflow should to be able to automatically pick up data from any source, support any file format, and convert it to your specs. And you should be able to do this without having to build new pipelines from scratch for every new data source
💡 CloverDX can handle any files you’re receiving. Because any part of CloverDX is completely customizable, it’s no problem to take in data in any format and convert it however you need.
And with CloverDX, you can monitor different locations for uploaded files, so whether clients upload their data to an SFTP site or send it via email, you can detect incoming data that needs to be processed, and load it into an ingestion pipeline automatically.
2. Transform data automatically
You know that all incoming data won't already 100% meet your specification, especially if you’re regularly receiving data from multiple clients. Which means you need to be able to easily transform from a variety of formats to meet your requirements.
Your data ingestion tool needs to be able to handle conversions, and also deal with real-life situations - so when clients add extra columns, or change things around from one upload to the next, it doesn’t mean your whole ingestion process fails, but it simply adapts on autopilot.
💡 CloverDX helps you take the burden off your clients and handle data conversions for them – but without adding extra manual work for you.
Building a flexible data ingestion framework means any incoming data can be transformed automatically, even if there are variances in input.
3. Automate processes so you can scale without extra resource
If your implementation or onboarding teams are having to manually process incoming data, that’s a real bottleneck to growth.
The way to eliminate it is to automate the process, so you can handle an extra 10, or 100, new customers, or an increase in frequency or volume of data, without needing to hire more people to do more manual work.
💡 With CloverDX as your data ingestion tool, you can build an entire end-to-end process that will run automatically, from detecting the arrival of new files to be ingested, through to validation, mapping and transformation, and with simple error reports to show you exactly where and when any issues occurred.
4. Be powerful enough for technical users, but accessible for business users too
It’s likely both business and technical users will need to be involved at some point in your data ingestion process.
But it's also likely you’ll want to offload as much of the work as possible from the engineering team to to less-technical users.
Choosing the right data ingestion tool can sometimes be a balance between something that has enough power and flexibility for your engineers, and something that’s user-friendly enough for business users to work with. If you get the balance right, business users can handle more of the workload themselves and reduce bottlenecks in the process.
💡CloverDX is a powerful data integration platform, but with different interfaces for different users, so everyone can work on the same process in a way that suits them.
For example – the development team can build a flexible data ingestion framework where, for each data source or client, the data mapping step is managed by a non-technical user in a simple drag-and-drop interface.
The technical team can create validation rules in code, and any data that still requires human review can be easily reviewed and managed by a domain expert in a user-friendly interface. All part of the same workflow on the same platform, no delay or frustrating back and forth, and workload is freed up from the highly technical users.
5. Be customizable to handle your specific use case
A basic ‘black box’ SaaS tool might be enough for you if your data formats and volumes are simple and predictable, and you just need to connect a source system to a destination.
But if you need more than that, your data ingestion tool should allow you to customize as much as you need – whether that’s building logic to perform transformations, calling external systems as part of your workflow, or developing in code to handle a tricky edge case.
💡Because it’s a fully-fledged data integration platform, CloverDX gives you more power and flexibility than some more basic data ingest tools. You can implement even complex transformations and validations (in code if you need to), and easily share and reuse components.
6. Have error-handling and reporting capabilities
When you’re regularly receiving data that can be of varying quality, you need data validation that can spot problems with incoming data before it causes downstream issues.
When you do get errors, you need to be able to see quickly and easily what the problem was. And because you’ll often need to go back to whoever supplied the data and tell them what the problem was too, your data ingestion tool needs to make that as easy as possible.
💡 CloverDX has powerful data validation features that help you monitor your data and spot any problems.
From performing basic checks like confirming incoming files are what’s expected, through to validation that can be as custom as you need, you can build in all the data quality checks you need. You can even define different validation rules for different client files.
And to make it easier for both you and clients to fix any problems, errors (and easy-to-understand error messages explaining which records had which problems) are automatically pulled into an easily-shareable spreadsheet.
7. Be robust, reliable, and scalable to your needs
When data ingestion needs a lot of manual work, or requires a complex process of spaghetti code, data can take too long to process, or the ingestion can even fail completely.
And as data volumes grow, or new data is uploaded more frequently, it only compounds the problem.
To be able to scale while keeping data reliable, you need to automate as much of the process as possible, and you need a platform that is resilient enough to handle multiple data formats at high volume.
💡 CloverDX is robust enough to allow you to automate entire end-to-end processes with powerful data validations, error handling and audit trails to increase reliability of your data. It can handle large volumes of data and it’s easy to scale capacity if you need to. Pricing is based on number of users, not data volume, so your costs are more predictable, even if your data volume increases.
A data ingestion tool for faster, easier file conversion
If you want to see how using CloverDX as your data ingestion tool could enable you to ingest data faster, whatever format you receive it in, and give your customers a seamless onboarding experience, book a demo.
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