What if data laid the groundwork for innovation?

Building a data foundation with Domo + Snowflake
National Tiles began working with Domo in 2021 to simplify its contractor management and installation scheduling processes. As adoption grew, teams across the business began using Domo to monitor performance, streamline communication between departments, and uncover new opportunities to improve efficiency.

However, the company’s data volumes and complexity expanded alongside its use of Domo. New systems, larger data sets, and more users created challenges for the BI team, who had to prepare and manage data for use in Domo and another BI tool. Duplicating data preparation made it difficult to maintain consistency, slowed down reporting, and limited the business’s ability to scale its analytics.  

“National Tiles has been on a pretty significant growth curve for a number of years. As we attempted to grow and improve the organization, we had disparate silos in terms of both data and initiatives, and so we desperately needed to bring something together that was cohesive,” Smith said.

By 2024, National Tiles began to explore solutions that would allow it to consolidate data management, strengthen governance, and create a single, trusted source of truth for the organization. To help meet that need, Domo collaborated with Snowflake to design a unified data architecture that would deliver both agility and control.  

Snowflake now serves as the company’s central data warehouse, providing a secure, governed foundation for all its information. Domo sits on top as the engagement layer, allowing business users to explore, visualize, and act on that data in real time. Together, the two platforms have eliminated redundant work, improved trust, and made it easier than ever for National Tiles to scale innovation.

“The relationship with Snowflake and Domo, and how they’ve been for our business, has just been transformational,” Smith said.

“One of the things that we found really exciting about working with Snowflake is being the bridge between IT and the business. Snowflake is a very powerful brand and very trusted. We’re both bringing something to the table. When we get strong customer outcomes, then that’s something that everybody benefits from,” said Stewart Faith, principal solutions engineer at Domo.

‍Powering over 50 apps across the business.
Since implementing Snowflake, National Tiles has expanded Domo access from 60 to more than 500 employees while using Domo’s App Studio to roll out more than 50 custom applications across the business. Business users across departments can now explore data, build dashboards, and create their own applications without waiting for IT. Snowflake ensures that the data behind those insights is accurate and secure, while Domo enables every user to turn these insights into action.

For example, the operations team built a Domo app that enables daily safety checks across more than 150 forklifts nationwide. Drivers can quickly record inspection results, which automatically feed into a central dashboard. Any failed checks trigger an immediate service order, ensuring that maintenance issues are identified and resolved before they disrupt business.

Meanwhile, the compliance team built an app using Domo Workflows that automatically generates the statutory documentation required for shipping dangerous goods around the country, which helps the company improve both compliance and operational efficiency.

“Access to data for people right across the organization has made their lives significantly easier,” Smith said. “They're no longer having to go and seek out the information they require to make decisions or take actions. That information is presented to them in whatever format serves them best in the role that they’re actually performing.”

Laying the foundation for AI  
Looking ahead, National Tiles is exploring new AI-driven use cases made possible by the trusted data foundation it has built with Domo and Snowflake. “AI’s obviously a huge buzzword. Everyone wants to focus on that, but you can't do that without having that strong foundation. You need to be able to trust that information, which is going to set up success for the future,” Faith said.

For example, the company plans to automate how inventory is allocated across warehouses and customer orders. By using AI to assess urgency, demand, and delivery timing, the company plans to dynamically optimize product movement across its nationwide network so that every customer receives the right product at the right time.

“I think the access to data and AI’s ability to make decisions is simply going to make it far easier for people in the retail industry to serve customers,” Smith said. “If you enhance their ability to make decisions and make them faster, then you gain the ability for a customer to be served faster and have a better experience, which is what it’s all about.”

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