Case Study

Cooperative Benefits Group Builds Entire IT Infrastructure in 4 Months with SnapLogic

Cooperative Benefits Group Backstory

Cooperative Benefits Group (CBG) is a startup healthcare company that provides pharmacy benefit management (PBM) and clinical pharmacy services to businesses desiring to engage in their pharmacy experience, to achieve self-sufficiency through differentiated, cost effective, and easy to use clinical and healthcare resources.

The Challenge

CBG was founded in January 2020 and had four months to stand up their IT infrastructure. They also began with just one engineer. They started their build with data, ETL/ELT, and compliance, which were the most fundamental parts of their tech stack. From there, they needed to do security, shared services, application and APIs, analytics, AI/ML; and bots, RPA and automation.

CBG needed to be able to create this infrastructure in as lean a manner as possible, without having to add additional staff or budget.

Their “must have” criteria included:

• Core ETL/ELT capability
• Quick to learn
• Low/no code for citizen development
• Automation capacity
• Cloud services and NoOps
• Enterprise security baked in
• API connectivity
• Infrastructure as code (CI/CD friendly)
• Advanced data features (AI, ML, big data)

“We needed a robust platform with the breadth and depth to help us build our entire infrastructure from the ground up,” said Mark Fowler, CIO at CBG, “and help us scale our IT practice in the future.”

They evaluated four integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions, including SnapLogic, and tested each one out by trying to build a core pipeline in a day.

The Solution

“With zero training on a trial account, in one day I was able to create an end-to-end pipeline. None of the other tools were able to do that,” said Davis Hansen, Sr. Data Warehouse and Integration Engineer at CBG. “SnapLogic met all of our criteria for what we wanted in a solution.”

“The beauty of SnapLogic is it’s low code simplicity and we were able to create an entire startup with one data architect managing it on weekends. SnapLogic let us avoid having to ramp up a full team which was critical to us as a new startup. We were able to do 95% of this with a one-man team in about three months,” said Hansen. “This process would have taken a larger team at least 18 months with any other tool.”

“For all the things we needed to do, SnapLogic just worked. As a healthcare company, it was also important to us that SnapLogic is HIPAA compliant right out of the box and uses secure practices for transferring data. This was huge for us,” said Hansen.

Business Results

CBG is running approximately 100 pipelines with more than 30 interfaces, moving several gigabytes of data daily. “We had 75% of these pipelines created within five months,” said Hansen, who is now part of a four person IT team. “I really like the simplicity of SnapLogic. The fact that you can jump in with just a web browser and a connection to a database somewhere and build an entire system is pretty remarkable.”

The company processes claims and eligibility data as a core function so their system must be always on, and they need sub-second response times and hyper-automation. With SnapLogic, they have reliable integrations, scalability, resilience, a guaranteed 99.99% uptime as they handle 1,000+ ETL, API and Bot pipeline executions per day. CBG was able to meet their go-live target date. Their data and integration engineer cycle times are two days on average, powering the business to move fast.

“We started looking at SnapLogic for other use cases and realized that we have an extremely powerful platform at our disposal. It’s about being able to do so much more than we could do otherwise. It takes a tremendous amount of brain capacity to walk the terrain in this fast growth healthcare startup. How do we keep our team lean? We first try to use the tools we have. We are constantly asking: Can SnapLogic do it? Nine times out of ten we find SnapLogic can do it,” said Hansen.

The company has expanded their use cases for SnapLogic to include APIs, bots, and CI/CD automation. They have developed conversational bots for their service team to use in Microsoft Teams, and SnapLogic acts as the bot logic. Thanks to SnapLogic, we are able to test new ideas and scale out all our core areas of IT to support our fast growing company and we look forward to accelerate our business even further,” said Fowler.