Chargebee's Transformation: From Data-as-a-Service to Reusable Data Products with Atlan

Chargebee is a market-leading technology solution for recurring revenue management, founded in 2011. The company supports over 4,500 customers and powers the entire recurring revenue life cycle, from subscription billing to invoicing, to cash revenue recognition, receivables, retention, and more. Chargebee supports more than 100 currencies across 53 countries, integrates with 55 revenue technologies, and maintains more than 30 payment gateways. The company's data team is responsible for all internal reporting and data needs across the organization, working together to drive the data culture at Chargebee. In early 2021, the company's growth accelerated significantly, leading to an increase in data requests and a need for a more efficient data management solution.

Chargebee, a leading technology solution for recurring revenue management, faced a significant challenge in early 2021 when its growth led to an increase in data requests. The company's Data Engineering team was responsible for processing these requests, both from internal colleagues and customers. However, the volume of requests was so high that internal data requests were often pushed to the back of the queue, leading to missed SLAs and dissatisfaction among stakeholders. The team attempted to address this issue by hiring new colleagues, but the transactional nature of their Data Engineering function made hiring difficult. They also tried to automate and standardize the process by creating dashboards and workflows, but these were often too bespoke to service with a single view of data. As a result, the data request volumes continued to grow, with the team receiving 350 requests per quarter, 80 of which were repetitive requests. Struggling to meet their SLAs and with growing escalations to subject matter experts, Chargebee needed to find a new way to meet their colleagues’ and customers’ expectations.

Chargebee began evaluating the Data & Analytics software market, focusing on self-service as a potential solution. They discovered the Active Metadata Management and third-gen data catalog market, and began evaluating Atlan. They were impressed with the features that Atlan had to offer, including the ability to set up a data catalog and a metric glossary. After choosing to purchase Atlan, the Chargebee team analyzed data from two previous quarters to understand who their most frequent requesters were and what type of data requests were coming into the system. They then onboarded a set of users from across the organization, who they called Atlan Champions. These users received thorough enablement, like walkthroughs, context on how to find data, and instructions on how to use Atlan. They also connected Tableau with Atlan, enabling data consumers to search for dashboards on Atlan, then land in the right resource in Tableau directly. With this solution, users could now search for relevant metrics, learning directly in Atlan how they are defined and calculated.

• The implementation of Atlan at Chargebee led to a significant shift in process and culture. The platform served as a one-stop-shop for anyone who wanted to explore data on their own, and with Tableau integrated, data consumers could now yield more value from existing reports. Atlan also served as a dashboard discovery tool, driving further adoption and building helpful habits. The impact of this shift was substantial, with adoption exceeding Chargebee’s expectations. The company's data team was able to offload more data requests to self-service users than expected, and requests were serviced far more quickly than before. This led to a significant reduction in time spent searching for and understanding data, and the company has received zero escalation requests since the Atlan rollout. The Chargebee team has learned the importance of being clear about the next step in their data journey and ensuring that they are solving for clearly defined business goals.

• 50% more data requests offloaded to self-service users than expected
• Time to resolution for data requests dropped by 90%, saving as many as 6 hours per month
• Zero escalation requests since the Atlan rollout