Wallbox (NYSE: WBX) is an innovative leader in electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions, offering a range of user-friendly products for private and public use. As a global leader in the EV charging industry, Wallbox has sold over 500,000 EV chargers worldwide and registered over 1 million users on its software platforms.
Data Disarray Fueled by Rapid Company Growth
Driven by rapid expansion of the global electric vehicle market, Wallbox has achieved a massive business growth since its debut on New York Stock Exchange in 2021. But as the business grew, Wallbox’s data team faced the new challenge of supporting the complex and sprawling data landscape of a public company.
When Alejo Buxeres Soler joined Wallbox as their Director of Data & Analytics, he was confronted with hundreds of Tableau dashboards connected to myriads of raw data sources, including their ERP system. This vast array of unorganized data was not just cumbersome to manage but also posed significant challenges to decision-making processes.
Executives at Wallbox, who were focused on making data-driven business decisions, regularly reviewed company Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). However, many times these discussions would end up going sideways because the submetrics, definitions of the metrics, and/or sources of data were inconsistent between business units and teams. The lack of a centralized, organized structure for their data made it not only difficult to make decisions but also to thoroughly understand what was going on with their business.
The company needed a solution that could not only streamline their existing data but also set a foundation for sustainable data management practices as they continued to grow.
To me, graphical lineage is beautiful but the summaries are more useful. In Select Star, you can easily see the source tables of a dashboard and you don't need to open everything up. You can go directly to where you want [in the data model].
Alejo Buxeres
Director of Data & Analytics at Wallbox
Implementing Select Star for Clarity and Control
In response to the challenges at Wallbox, Alejo sought a solution that could address the inconsistencies in data across different business units and streamline data governance at Wallbox. His focus was to build a platform that can help standardize metrics, data sources, and dashboards but also be easy to use for everyone in the company.
After evaluating several data catalog solutions on the market, Alejo chose Select Star for its technical prowess in metadata integration and management. Select Star stood out due to its deep integrations with BI tools like Tableau, and its usability and practicality of column-level lineage.
By looking at the “Source Tables” of different reports via data lineage, Alejo's team was able to trace the origins and transformations of their data fueling the most important dashboards. With this knowledge, they were able to prioritize remodeling their Tableau data sources and tables. In addition, they were able to device a tiered system, where each tier requires a governance process and SLA attached for the data team to maintain:
Tier 1: Company metrics most crucial for high-level reporting and decision-making, like revenue, sales, and active users.
Tier 2: Granular data that supports Tier 1 metric, such as orders.
Tier 3: Domain-specific metrics that may or may not be a part of Tier 1 metric calculation.
In addition, Select Star revealed unused tables and dashboards downstream of their core data models. By checking the lineage of these data assets and confirming they were redundant, Wallbox was able to confidently deprecate the redundant data assets and clean up their data pipelines.
By providing deep integrations and metadata analysis of Snowflake, Tableau, and dbt, Select Star helped Wallbox establish a more disciplined approach to data management, ensuring that the data used across the company was accurate and reliable.
Select Star played a significant role in improving data management at Wallbox. It truly streamlined our team’s work of data modeling and governance process.
Alejo Buxeres
Director of Data & Analytics at Wallbox
Data Standardization & Future-Ready Governance
With implementation of Select Star, Alejo and the Wallbox team have achieved a strong foundation of internal data governance standards, metrics, and processes. Company metrics are now organized with domains and owners, with tier systems based on the impact of the metric. There’s also a data certification process, data literacy training, and data dictionary in Select Star as the source of truth. This standardization is facilitating more informed, data-driven decisions to be made by every data consumer at Wallbox.
Looking ahead, Wallbox plans to continue using Select Star to enhance and maintain its data governance practices, keeping pace with the company's constantly evolving data needs.
