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customer story

Top Shelf realized a 30X faster time-to-setup

Australia's largest & fastest-growing premium spirits company

Distilleries

Executive summary

Business challenge

Topshelf wanted to leverage manufacturing & sales data to make better-informed decisions. The challenge was around integrating unstructured data from multiple, non-standard sources. 

Solution

5X set up an end-to-end data platform tailored to Top Shelf’s needs, integrating vendors based on Top Shelf’s business requirements and budget. 

Impact

Top Shelf realized a 30X faster time-to-setup. The data team could leverage data quickly without incurring high costs or delays in piecing together a data platform from separate vendors.

Top Shelf data stack

Novo data stack

Data sources

Data Ingestion

Data Storage

Data Reporting

Data Ingestion

Data Warehouse

Data Modeling

Business Intelligence

Product Analytics

Customer Data Platform

The challenge

Equipping business teams with accurate data to make better-informed decisions

“You had people making decisions without facts they needed. There was quite a lag between something happening & when we knew it happened. And a lot of information wasn’t available at all. We knew that a modern data platform would address our challenges but we didn’t know where to begin. There were so many tools & it was hard to figure out which suited us. That’s where 5X came in.”

Steve Hibberd

DATA & STRATEGY LEAD

The 5X solution

A fully-managed, custom data platform

Top Shelf leveraged 5X to create a data platform tailored to their unique needs. Out-of-the-box, the 5X platform helped Top Shelf by

  • Recommending best-fit data vendors
  • Integrating data from non-standard sources
  • Giving the data team a single platform to operate multiple vendors
  • Monitoring spend on the data platform

5X & Gravity also built custom connectors without extra costs. It was integrated into the 5X ecosystem.

“5X was perfect fit - A fully-managed data platform with the flexibility to choose best-in-class vendors. If you want to do this yourself, you have to sign five vendors. And it takes six months just to set it up. With 5X, we were up and running in no time.”

Steve Hibberd

DATA & STRATEGY LEAD

5X helped drive three key business goals

Optimizing marketing spends
Understanding app usage & user behavior
Preventing fraud & money laundering

The Impact

$350,000

savings per year

20%

boost in data team productivity

The impact: 30X faster time-to-setup

Before

60

Days

After

2

Days

“The speed at which our data team was able to use 5X to generate insights surprised Top Shelf’s leaders, who had been sceptical about the project. The reaction was, just wow.”

What’s in store for the future?

“We’re confident that 5X will help us address future use cases while keeping spends low.”

“Near term, we want the data warehouse to become a source of truth. And push data into our sales & manufacturing via Reverse ETL. 5X has proven to be a very nimble partner,” Hibbard adds. “without them, this would have been a more difficult, longer, and more distracting project than it has been.”

Steve Hibberd

DATA & STRATEGY LEAD