When Brimstone Engineer Erwin Kuhn reached out to Felt, the team had already tackled a huge problem. They had developed a breakthrough decarbonized process that produces the same quality cement we use for building today. The new challenge was a spatial one: how to select optimal sites to scale their manufacturing operations efficiently.
Erwin’s team was charged with processing large spatial datasets to share with the executive team as a business intelligence tool for the selection process. He tested alternative enterprise mapping tools, but with all the necessary data sources loaded, the map slowed to a crawl. Left with little choice, Erwin invested time in building internal tools to get the performance results he needed.
The first thing that impressed Erwin about Felt was the performance. Then, the pace of development. Once Felt delivered filtering capabilities, a key feature needed for Brimstone’s site selection process, the decision to throw out the current tools and move forward with Felt was easy.
“My philosophy is to leverage great tools so that we can focus on what matters to our business instead of wasting time building our tool stack on all fronts. By adopting Felt, I not only saved my own time but I didn’t have to invest in hiring a full-time web developer just to maintain all of these tools.”
Implementation was “really really easy.” Initially the team wrote a wrapper for the REST API to programmatically upload data to Felt, and after that, it was adding two or three lines of code to convert the geodata frame into a Felt layer. Now, their PostgresSQL database is connected directly, eliminating the need to write any functions.
“I’m an infrastructure engineer and it's been a while since I even looked at anything related to the infrastructure with Felt, which is kind of a dream scenario.”
Brimstone’s primary use for Felt was to inform the business and strategic decisions around site selection and since setting up Felt, it’s become a core part of the process. Brimstone’s data scientists and business functions reference maps multiple times a week. Their data catalog is growing.
“Felt’s made communication of our data way easier and provided way more collaboration than we could have ever achieved if we had to build the customer solution.”
And with Felt’s pace of development not slowing down, Erwin’s been surprised at the number of new use cases they’ve found.
“The new dashboard features have allowed our BizOps teams and other data consumers to aggregate data by region and surface key statistics without touching any of the code – they just zoom around the map. It’s entirely self-serve.”
