Saint-Gobain gains real-time SAP data, optimizes spend with Fivetran

“With Fivetran, we went from 4-hour data delays to real-time insights — and reduced pipeline build costs by 50%. It completely changed the game for us.”
— Babacar Seck, Head of Data Integration at Saint-Gobain

Saint-Gobain, a global leader in designing, manufacturing, and distributing materials for the construction and industrial sectors, operates in over 70 countries and has long been recognized for its commitment to innovation and efficiency. But as the business scaled, so did the complexity of its data infrastructure. 

Legacy tools like SAP SLT and Azure Data Factory demanded significant engineering effort to build and maintain pipelines. SLT’s lack of compatibility with Snowflake on Azure further compounded the challenge, introducing data latency and limiting the company’s ability to scale across systems like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP ERP on HANA. These bottlenecks stalled decision making and made it harder to meet the growing demand for real-time data access.

To fix these issues, Saint-Gobain hired Babacar Seck as Head of Data Integration. With 5 years at L’Oréal building real-time data exchange platforms, Seck brought deep experience in API- and event-driven integration. Though new to database ingestion, he quickly saw the opportunity to modernize Saint-Gobain’s approach to data movement — turning it into a service that could scale across the enterprise. His goal: eliminate inefficiencies, reduce costs, and provide the business with real-time data it could trust.

From legacy infrastructure to modern, automated ingestion

Saint-Gobain’s data foundation was functional, but its existing tools weren’t built for modern, scalable ingestion. SAP SLT, while effective for SAP sources, couldn’t support the growing variety of systems Saint-Gobain relied on. Azure Data Factory helped extend coverage but required fully custom-built pipelines that were time-consuming to develop, expensive to maintain, and fragile under pressure. 

As a result, data latency often exceeded 4 hours — making real-time analytics nearly impossible and slowing the business’s ability to act on insights. Seck’s team needed a platform that could handle change data capture (CDC) across all key systems (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, SAP ERP on HANA) while minimizing engineering effort and enabling scale across regions and business units.

Working with Gartner, Saint-Gobain launched an extensive market evaluation, reviewing 7 leading data integration platforms. After narrowing the list to 2 finalists for a proof of concept, Fivetran quickly emerged as the standout. Its low-code, fully managed platform eliminated the need to hand-build pipelines thanks to its large connector library of over 700 data sources. And with security top of mind for Saint-Gobain, following a 2017 cyberattack, Fivetran’s enterprise-grade security model gave Seck and his team peace of mind.

Just 3 months after the POC, the company went live on Fivetran, eliminating its maintenance burden, reducing data latency from hours down to seconds, and cutting data pipeline costs by 50%.

Driving business-wide impact with real-time data

Fivetran’s first major deployment at Saint-Gobain focused on integrating SAP ERP on HANA data for the Latin America (LATAM) team — a region previously held back by the limitations of SAP SLT. The legacy approach had led to frequent data quality issues, long refresh cycles, and constant system failures. By switching to Fivetran’s automated CDC pipelines, the LATAM team unlocked real-time data access, cut hours-long latency to just seconds, and gained built-in monitoring that surfaced issues before the business ever noticed them. Teams no longer needed to manually verify data, restoring trust and freeing them to act on insights faster. 

From there, Saint-Gobain rapidly scaled Fivetran adoption across regions and business units, making it the standard for moving data throughout the enterprise. In Northern Europe, for example, the Glava team used Fivetran to integrate Oracle data that lacked primary keys — something that had caused persistent duplication issues with previous tools. Fivetran’s merge-refresh capability solved the problem elegantly.

In Japan, a team managing Salesforce data replaced a fragile, high-cost Azure Data Factory pipeline with Fivetran, gaining data reliability and slashing infrastructure expenses. For audit and compliance teams using SQL Server, Fivetran delivered real-time visibility — an essential upgrade for time-sensitive reporting.

These examples highlight a broader reality: Saint-Gobain’s international footprint comes with region-specific data infrastructure and use cases. Seck’s team must support a wide variety of systems, architectures, and regulatory demands — and Fivetran’s flexibility allows them to do just that. 

“The business was amazed by how quickly data was available. The difference between SLT and Fivetran was night and day. Compared to ADF, we no longer needed to spend days building and troubleshooting pipelines just to get the basics working.”
— Babacar Seck, Head of Data Integration at Saint-Gobain

The game-changer: Fivetran Connector SDK

As Saint-Gobain ramped up its data modernization, Fivetran’s Connector SDK proved to be a quiet game-changer — it eliminated the need for Azure Data Factory in many cases and is projected to save €50,000 in infrastructure costs tied to complex, long-running pipelines. Connector SDK made it easy to build connectors for niche use cases — like pulling daily exchange rates from simple APIs or extracting Excel files from SharePoint — cutting build time from days to hours.

Globally, Saint-Gobain operates numerous SAP and Oracle instances, each with unique architectures and regional requirements. With Fivetran’s flexible deployment options — cloud, self-hosted, and hybrid — as well as support for custom data sources through the SDK, the company can now support a wide variety of systems and endpoints, no matter the configuration.

The biggest win: speed. Seck’s team can move faster, respond to business needs more quickly, and take on more projects. By the end of 2024, they had completed 25 successful integrations — more than triple the previous year. By the 18-month mark in May 2025, they had completed more than 40 projects.

“The SDK was a huge, huge surprise — in the best way. We expected to keep using Azure Data Factory for APIs because it was the only option. But once we saw what we could do with Fivetran’s Connector SDK, everything changed. We can now build custom connectors in-house and respond to business needs much faster.”
— Babacar Seck, Head of Data Integration at Saint-Gobain

The future of scaling, AI, and deeper partnerships

Fivetran now sits at the core of Saint-Gobain’s modern data architecture. All new data projects are being implemented with Fivetran as the foundation, thanks to its ability to scale across teams, regions, and complex infrastructure needs. Whether through cloud, self-hosted, or hybrid, Fivetran gives Saint-Gobain the flexibility to handle real-time data ingestion across a growing range of sources — from SAP and Oracle to MongoDB, SharePoint, and custom APIs.

This standardization has allowed Seck’s team to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive enablement. Fivetran’s monitoring and alerting tools surface issues before they impact business users, restoring trust in both the data and the data team. Where legacy systems stalled innovation, Fivetran has cleared a path forward. Projects that were once deemed too complex — due to schema complexities, performance concerns, or lack of resources — are now up and running.

“Fivetran didn’t just solve our data ingestion problems — it gave us the foundation to transform how we work with data across the entire company.”
— Babacar Seck, Head of Data Integration at Saint-Gobain

With real-time SAP pipelines in place, Saint-Gobain is building toward advanced use cases like predictive maintenance, inventory forecasting, and process optimization. The company is also exploring hybrid deployments to bring SaaS into its own infrastructure for added control and security. What started as a tactical integration tool has become a strategic lever, empowering Saint-Gobain to scale its data capabilities and meet the growing demands of a global, data-driven business.

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