Data Onboarding Best Practices to Improve and Scale Your Process

Do you expect customers to send perfectly clean datasets that matches your system's schema? Probably not, because everybody's data is different—from formats and headers to nulls, structure, and more. There's no universal standard.

Data onboarding is a routine process for many SaaS companies, but it's not always easy to upload external data and ingest it into your operational systems. It takes manual work to make sure data is properly formatted and cleaned, which pulls your technical teams away from core projects. 

Using low-code External Data Platform for self-serve and automated data imports is an efficient way to bring in clean, usable data at scale. Osmos frees up your teams to spend more time on dev work rather than manually uploading and wrangling data.

To improve and scale your data importing process, we'll walk through two options for streamlining your process with Osmos Uploader and Osmos Pipelines.

Self-Serve Data Onboarding with Osmos Uploader

Osmos Uploader is a self-serve, embeddable smart data uploader that empowers your end-users to send you clean data. Without having to write code, end-users can use no-code data transformation to format, map, and clean the data to match your system’s schema before.

Osmos Uploader helps streamline several business processes:

• Customer Data Onboarding - create an Uploader for one-time customer data onboarding when you begin working with new customers.
• Self-Serve Data Imports - customers and internal teams can utilize Osmos Uploader for recurring batch data imports on a weekly or monthly basis.
  

Osmos Uploader is the ideal way to create a custom data importing process, because of its custom style options and intuitive interface. You simply select the destination for the imported data, configure and style the button so data is imported in the proper format, embed the javascript snippet into your web application, and enjoy clean, usable data with every import.

Looking for a way to automate frequent external data imports? Osmos Pipelines is better suited for teams that need to clean and schedule data imports on recurring schedule.

Automate Data Onboarding with Osmos Pipelines

Osmos Pipelines equips your internal teams to clean up messy data with no-code data transformations and write it into your operational systems with a few clicks. You can add data directly into your system by scheduling recurring pipelines, which means it's simple to set and forget routine data imports.

The best part? All the data ingested into your system is mapped, cleaned, and ready to use. Osmos AI learns data transformations from examples and formulas, such as conditional logic (If/then), column split/merges, string manipulation, numerical manipulation, and validations. And a built-in management system makes it easy to resolve errors and manage transformations.

Osmos Pipelines is the perfect solution for automating your data onboarding process because it allows you to:

• Run frequent imports. Pipelines can be set up on a recurring schedule or manually triggered to run at any time so you never miss a dataset.
• Provide premium service. Automated data imports help you provide a premium customer experience by streamlining operations and communication.
• Ingest data from partners and distributors. Ingest clean data from external partners every time, improving your partner’s experience and database quality.
  

Osmos Pipelines is an ideal solution for frequent data imports, importing large datasets, or if want to save your customers’ or partners’ time by handling data imports internally.

Still unsure which is right for your data import needs? The chart below will help you decide whether Osmos Uploader or Osmos Pipelines is best fit for your needs.

Osmos Uploaders + Pipelines Are Better Together

Both Osmos Uploader and Pipelines are designed to take the pain out of data collaboration using no-code data transformations. While Osmos Uploaders are best for companies that need a self-serve data import solution, Osmos Pipelines are ideal for automated data ingestion when handling frequent and/or large file size data imports.

Combining both solutions gives you the flexibility and control to have self-serve or automated data imports, because what works for one customer doesn't always work for another. You can give your customers the freedom to import data or whether you want your internal team to manage the import.

For example, an insurance company uses Osmos Pipelines as no-code ETL to automate their data onboarding from several partners to run several times per hour using the Osmos HTTP API and email connectors, while also providing a self-serve experience with Osmos Uploader for those monthly imports from partners.

No matter which solution you choose, Osmos Uploader and Osmos Pipelines simplify the customer data onboarding process so your teams can focus on building products and serving customers. And not, manual data wrangling, maintaining connectors, and troubleshooting broken code.