Snowflake Data Cloud Unifies 40 ERPs and Drives $1.1B+ in Value for Global Manufacturer

ABB, a global leader in electrification and automation, operates across 20 divisions and four business areas serving customers worldwide. The company's technology ecosystem included 40 geographically dispersed ERPs, 100 country-based organizations, 25 different data warehouses, 4,000 applications, and 15 SAP Business Warehouse instances. This fragmented infrastructure created bottlenecks in data consolidation. According to Michael Thorne, Global Analytics Product Engineering and Delivery Manager at ABB, "To get a global set of usable data took us a month of data wrangling, and, by that time, the information was out of date." Previous attempts with Hadoop solutions consumed excessive resources, with 50% of the team's capacity devoted to managing and maintaining the platform rather than building analytical solutions. ABB needed a scalable, efficient platform to centralize data and enable real-time decision-making across its global operations.

ABB implemented the Snowflake Data Cloud to create an "extract once, use everywhere" strategy, replacing nightly extracts with a near real-time change data capture (CDC) process. Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enabled governed collaboration across ABB's four business areas, making it simpler to build data products for marketing analytics, quotation metrics, production line tools, and supply chain dashboards used by thousands of ABB users globally. This unified data foundation powered critical use cases that delivered measurable business impact. In the electrification business, ABB's supply chain analytics solution identified opportunities to avoid unnecessary inventory purchases for canceled orders during supply chain disruptions. The company achieved approximately $200 million in annual inventory savings, with a single initiative saving approximately $4.5 million per week in canceled purchase orders. ABB also leveraged Snowflake-powered pricing algorithms to enable complex decisions balancing order volume and profit margins across multiple products and sectors, resulting in $900 million in revenue growth in the U.S. market alone.

ABB's distributor optimization dashboard, powered by Snowflake, identified suboptimal ordering patterns and recommended improvements to the electrification sales team. This data-driven approach delivered $1.4 million in operational cost savings for ABB's distributors, reduced split case orders by 22%, increased distributor order volume by 36%, and grew total purchase-order value by 45% despite a 6% decline in total purchase orders received. According to Thorne, "We provided distributors with a recommended order pattern based on data models on Snowflake, so they could maintain proper case sizing and receive products in a regular cadence. This reduced the number of orders they needed to place, minimized their inventory carrying costs and lowered their order overhead." The success of Snowflake's role-based access controls and data governance features enabled ABB to expand its data-first mentality across business areas. Snowflake Marketplace further accelerated insights by providing direct access to third-party data products such as construction and commodity data, reducing time to actionable insight and enabling ABB to scale supply chain optimization initiatives across additional business units.