How Kimberly-Clark Became Agile With Panoply and Saved $250K
One of the highlights of my time at Panoply was hosting webinars where customers shared real problems and real wins. This session with Kimberly-Clark’s AMIA division was exactly that — a Fortune 500 team breaking down how they saved a quarter million dollars by rethinking their data stack. That’s the kind of stuff that sticks with you.
Helena Carr joined from Kimberly-Clark as an omni-channel analytics professional working across their Americas division. The problem was familiar: manual infrastructure, expensive, slow. Data scattered across 100+ sources, analysts drowning in ETL work, the warehouse a constant bottleneck.
Helena and Matt Lubrano (our data architect) walked through the specific pain — and it wasn’t abstract. It was “we’re spending too much time on data plumbing and not enough on analysis.” They needed something that could handle ingestion from 100+ sources, autoscale without babysitting, and let the team focus on business questions instead of infrastructure.
Panoply wasn’t just a warehouse here — it was an integrated ELT engine. Automated ingestion, ML-powered data enrichment, smart query optimization with caching and materialized views, built-in data hygiene. The elastic warehouse meant Kimberly-Clark could scale without manual intervention — auto-scaling for concurrent queries, burst capacity, and S3 archival for cold data.
The result? $250K in savings. But beyond the dollar amount, it was the agility shift that mattered. A global CPG brand with complex supply chains and countless data sources suddenly had faster time-to-insight. Analysts could actually analyze instead of fighting infrastructure fires.
Key Takeaways
- Cost and speed aren’t opposites. Automating data plumbing freed up budget and time for actual analysis.
- Complexity hides at scale. 100+ data sources and manual processes will break. Intelligent automation isn’t optional.
- Real ROI comes from enabling your analysts. The money saved on infrastructure is less important than the insights your team can now produce.