A window into global expansion
For more than 60 years, Jeld-Wen has been designing, producing and distributing a wide range of doors and windows that blend form and function. Dedicated to bringing high-quality products to customers at the best price, Jeld-Wen is continuously expanding its business with more than 18,000 global employees and manufacturing facilities across North America and Europe.
Having grown rapidly as a global business following multiple acquisitions, Jeld-Wen needed to centralize all of its disparate data across companies into a single, more modern data platform. Jeld-Wen chose Snowflake as the backbone of its enterprise data platform, leading to a €10-million increase in revenue, fewer operating costs and greater use of data in daily decision-making for employees.
Story Highlights
Insights create €10 million in incremental revenue: Built in Snowflake, Jeld-Wen’s margin data model helped teams better understand the company’s margins and develop a successful pricing strategy that increased incremental revenue by millions.
Single source of truth improves decision-making: Snowflake's ease of use allows all employees to seamlessly apply data to their work and make better business decisions around product margin rates, sales strategy and cost management.
A modern data platform removes inefficiencies: Despite multiple acquisitions, teams no longer have to wrangle with different data sources and silos — so they can spend more of their time gaining and applying insights that grow the business.
Closing the door on siloed data and complex systems
Before Snowflake, Jeld-Wen was "data rich but information poor," says Graham Whetton, head of analytics and data for Europe. While the company’s ambitious acquisition strategy led to global expansion, new data sets and fresh opportunities, it also created challenges when trying to integrate a complex mix of legacy data systems. With data scattered across disparate systems and reporting processes, the company struggled to answer key business questions around market performance, customer behavior and pricing strategies.
Whetton and his team turned to Snowflake to break down these data silos and gain a clearer, central view of its business.
Our goal was to bring European businesses together, and Snowflake has been key to unlocking all this data to drive better efficiencies, understand our markets and establish a better price for our customers to sell products more effectively.”
Graham Whetton
Head of Analytics and Data for Europe, Jeld-Wen
Rebuilding pricing strategies to gain €10 million in revenue
A key priority for Jeld-Wen was to optimize pricing across its business in the U.K., France, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Prior to Snowflake, Jeld-Wen “had no ability to look at margins of our data," Whetton says. The company struggled to itemize the individual expenses of producing a door — from the cost of material, labor and energy to variable overheads. Pricing changes were applied to all products without a data-driven understanding of which products were selling well, how they were priced in the market and who the target customer base was.
Whetton’s team overhauled Jeld-Wen’s pricing strategy by building a margin data model that consolidated more than 35 systems into Snowflake. From there, the data team created a Tableau dashboard so that teams across the organization could gain easy access to relevant data in a single, governed place.
“Snowflake was the backbone that helped us achieve €10 million in revenue because it allowed us to better understand our margins and make smarter pricing decisions.”
Graham Whetton
Head of Analytics and Data for Europe, Jeld-Wen
Today, Jeld-Wen adjusts prices by product groups rather than across the board — a more informed, data-led strategy that has increased revenue and made the organization more competitive. “Our focus was to retain market share by being experts in our own data,” Whetton says. “Snowflake helped us examine and understand our data more than we ever could before.”
Hinging on insights across the business — while keeping costs in check
With Snowflake now at the core of Jeld-Wen’s modern data platform, Whetton's team has helped transform how the entire company uses data across everything from daily tasks to crucial business decisions.
Before Snowflake, the company used QlikView for sales reporting, which was complicated to use and required clicks through five different filters to see an accurate sales number. Now, Jeld-Wen’s Tableau dashboard, based on the margin data model built in Snowflake, empowers everyone in the company with quick, simple access to data — from an individual sales team member to the CFO and the CEO. “The key thing is that Snowflake is easy to use for our entire team,” Whetton says. “I trust the product. It always performs well, and it's very easy to understand what's going on in the solution.”
As the use of Snowflake exponentially grew across Jeld-Wen, the team ensured that costs stayed in check with built-in cost optimization features like auto-scaling, auto-resume and auto-suspend. With Snowflake’s easy-to-use dashboards that track usage, the team has granular visibility into their spend, helping them make queries across the business more cost-effective.
“Snowflake has made a transformational change in how employees think about data,” Whetton says. “Beyond providing us with an easy-to-use reporting system, the platform has helped employees trust and rely on data, which will help us achieve a number of important initiatives this year to drive revenue."
Snowflake is such a flexible tool, and there is so much joy in using it, which is a major benefit for the team. They can accomplish more work than they ever have before.”
Graham Whetton
Head of Analytics and Data for Europe, Jeld-Wen
Crossing the threshold into a data-first future
Moving forward, Whetton expects Snowflake usage to continue to grow across the company. The team plans to drill more into stock analysis, raw material pricing and forecasting, and Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing will be a foundation for success.
"I've been able to build a bigger team because we know there's going to be more work coming," Whetton says. "And that's what excites me: As the team grows, so do our opportunities — and Snowflake will help us seize each one that comes our way."
