Scaling Data Pipelines with Rivery and Amazon Redshift: How Gymlib Transformed Data Operations to Support 50X Growth

Gymlib is a French-based marketplace that provides corporate wellness solutions. Founded in 2014, it enables companies to offer their employees access to over 300 activities across 4,500+ sports and wellness facilities. 

With a growing customer base of 800 companies and 450,000 beneficiaries, Gymlib is the leading provider of sports and wellness solutions for enterprises in France. The company’s mission is to improve employee health and well-being through sports, fostering a commitment-free, active lifestyle.

Challenge Overview

As Gymlib experienced rapid growth, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company faced escalating challenges with its data operations. The foundational systems, initially built using basic tools, began to falter under increased demand. Data preparation that once took hours now consumed up to 15 hours, and it was fraught with errors. 

With their existing infrastructure, data coverage was inconsistent, and the data team, which started with one person, struggled to maintain reliable data for both analytics and crucial accounting billing processes.

The increasing volume of data, including operations data and third-party app data, made it impossible to maintain accuracy without manual adjustments, resulting in significant inefficiencies. As Gymlib expanded, there was a pressing need to modernize its data infrastructure to scale efficiently and reduce the operational burden on the data team.

Solution Overview

Gymlib turned to Rivery to address these challenges and transform its data operations. The key objectives for Gymlib’s data team were simplicity, ease of setup, and minimal infrastructure management. After assessing various options, Gymlib selected Rivery for its cloud-based platform that integrates seamlessly with its Amazon Redshift data warehouse, offering the necessary flexibility and speed to scale its data pipelines.

Rivery’s solution enabled Gymlib to automate data integration from seven key sources, including application databases and third-party SaaS apps, into their data warehouse, significantly reducing the time and effort required for data processing. Rivery’s ability to integrate directly with Amazon Redshift provided a streamlined solution for Gymlib to centralize its data and perform real-time analysis.

The platform’s ability to integrate custom APIs and offer reverse ETL functionality also proved critical. For example, enriched data from Redshift was pushed back into HubSpot for marketing automation.

By leveraging Rivery’s support services, Gymlib built a robust and scalable data infrastructure. The platform’s intuitive design and extensive support helped Gymlib’s data team, led by Tristan Chauchat, streamline their data processes, ensuring that critical operational data for billing and invoicing was accurate and timely. The flexibility to create custom connectors for specific APIs ensured that no data source would be left behind, meeting the growing needs of the business.

Benefits Delivered to Gymlib

With Rivery in place, Gymlib reduced its data integration process from 15 hours to just 25 minutes, even with a 50X increase in data volume. The data team, which had previously required one full-time employee (FTE) to manage data quality, now only needs one day a month to oversee the accounting process. Similarly, another financial process that once required an FTE is now automated, saving three days a month.

These time savings have allowed Gymlib to reallocate resources to support other critical business processes, enabling continued growth without increasing the workload on the data team. Additionally, the ease of onboarding new users and the minimal need for infrastructure management means that Gymlib’s small data team can focus on business insights rather than on maintaining complex systems.

Rivery’s automation and ease of use, integrated with Amazon Redshift, proved to be a perfect fit for Gymlib’s needs, empowering their data team to scale operations efficiently and cost-effectively.