How Flo Energy Transformed Data Operations and Achieved 80% MAU with Holistics

Flo Energy Singapore, a rapidly growing leader in renewable electricity and solar solutions, faced challenges in managing its complex data needs as it expanded from 20 to 150 employees in just over a year.

After building a strong data foundation, they sought a business intelligence platform that could support their advanced analytics requirements. Holistics emerged as the top choice, offering seamless integration with dbt, centralized analytics logic, and a powerful Analytics-as-Code approach. Since its adoption, Flo has achieved an 80% Monthly Active User (MAU) rate, underscoring the platform's effectiveness in empowering teams to make data-driven decisions.

In 2023, Flo experienced rapid growth, expanding from 20 to 150 employees in just over a year. This growth brought new operational challenges, particularly in managing the increasingly complex data needs of the business.

The existing tools, which included a mix of Excel sheets and Grafana dashboards, were insufficient for the scalability and flexibility required to support the company’s evolving operations and strategic goals. When Nils Terpstra joined Flo as Head of Flex & Trading Analytics, he quickly recognized that the company’s current data infrastructure could not keep pace with its ambitions. Critical operations were being managed with ad hoc solutions that lacked the robustness needed for long-term success.

Nils knew that transforming Flo’s data operations needed a solid foundation. He prioritized building a strong data infrastructure to ensure clean, accessible data, laying the groundwork for advanced analytics and seamless dbt integration.

“We started by focusing heavily on data engineering,” Nils explained. “Without clean, accessible data, no analytics tool would deliver value.”

With a dedicated data team in place and a solid data infrastructure established, Nils was ready to evaluate business intelligence platforms that could meet Flo’s growing needs.

To navigate the BI tool landscape, Nils engaged Aurai - an experienced analytics implementation partner from Europe. The partner recommended several tools based on their deep knowledge of the market. One of the considered tools was Lightdash, which initially seemed promising due to its strong connection with the dbt semantic layer.

However, it quickly became clear that this reliance also made the tool rigid and challenging to adapt. Nils quickly found that:

While Lightdash has a good integration with dbt metrics, it adds friction to the dashboard creation process.

If you want to change the metric, do a graph of sums, or anything else, then it gets down to the level where you have to touch the code quite soon. There might be data teams who want full control of all the dashboards and want all of them to be well-defined in dbt, but in the process of doing so they make the whole process super rigid. This means that it takes longer to develop solutions and it makes it impossible for our business stakeholders to self-serve.

-- Nils T., Head of Data & Analytics

This rigidity was a significant drawback for Flo, which needed to remain agile and responsive to changing business needs.

Holistics, on the other hand, provided a much more agile and user-friendly experience. It allowed business users to quickly build and modify dashboards without needing to write or edit code. Nils highlighted this benefit:

With Holistics, it’s very easy to just make a dashboard without touching any code.

If you want to change a metric or build reports quickly, you don’t have to dive into the code—Holistics takes care of that, keeping everything consistent across the board.

-- Nils T., Head of Data & Analytics

This ease of use for the business stakeholders, combined with Holistics' powerful features, made it the best choice for Flo, addressing the critical needs that all the other tools could not address as well:

• Centralized Analytics Logic: Holistics allows metrics and business rules to be defined once and reused across multiple reports, ensuring consistency.
• Define Analytics Using Code: The platform supports a maintainable version-controlled workflow with code-based analytics development and Git integration for seamless version control.
• Self-Service Analytics: Analysts can prepare datasets, and business users are empowered to create dashboards without needing SQL expertise by utilizing a centralized semantic modeling layer that ensures oversight and consistent.
• Integration with dbt: Holistics offers deep integration with dbt, surfacing dbt metadata within the BI layer, which is crucial for maintaining alignment between data transformation and analytics.
• Embedded Analytics: Holistics makes it easy to embed dashboards into their own application for their customers.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Holistics ensures data security and confidentiality with RBAC, allowing specific dashboards to be restricted to particular teams, addressing potential future confidentiality concerns.

After selecting Holistics, Nils and his team focused on leveraging its capabilities to transform how data was managed and utilized across the company.

Holistics enabled Flo business users to build and modify reports independently, greatly improving the decision-making process.

A lot of these dashboards used to be Excel sheets that people had to manually run every day. With Holistics, you win all that time back.

It’s also more accurate because we have to build a version controlled dbt solution for it instead of non-version controlled queries in Excel written by one person. It also means that collaboration is way easier because if everything's in Excel, it's horrible to work together, right? And it's not very scalable.

-- Nils T., Head of Data & Analytics

Holistics also provided valuable tools for collaboration and data management.

The ability to share dashboards via password-protected links and control access through RBAC was particularly beneficial. This feature allowed Flo to manage sensitive data effectively, ensuring that specific dashboards could be restricted to certain teams, especially with Flo’s expansion into the Australian market, addressing potential confidentiality concerns as the company continues to grow.

Additionally, Holistics’ Usage Monitoring feature allowed Nils to track how dashboards were being used across the organization, ensuring that the insights generated were reaching the right people and making an impact.

It's very useful that I can see if people checked a certain dashboard, for instance, to monitor if everything we're doing is actually being used, which is a useful metric for me. I know what to focus on!

-- Nils T., Head of Data & Analytics

Since adopting Holistics, Flo has seen a significant increase in engagement across the organization. With around 80% Monthly Active Users (MAU), the platform has become an integral part of the company’s operations.

This high adoption rate is a testament to the platform’s ease of use and its ability to meet the diverse needs of both technical and non-technical users. Holistics has successfully empowered teams across Flo to make data-driven decisions more efficiently, contributing to the company’s continued growth and success.