Kramp Slashes Analyst Onboarding From Days to Minutes With Self-Serve dbt Mesh Tool

Kramp, Europe's largest wholesaler of spare parts and accessories for agriculture, forestry, grounds care, and construction, has cut analyst onboarding from days to minutes using an internal tool called Data Project Factory. Senior data engineer Trang Trinh presented the results at dbt Summit 2026.

The company, founded in 1951, operates more than 500,000 products across 11 distribution centers and 24 sales offices. Its central data team had become a bottleneck, fielding dozens of domain requests a week, while analysts built unversioned BigQuery queries under personal credentials - a situation Trinh described as a "shadow BI wild west." The central team also held superuser access to everything, including sensitive customer and payroll data.

Data Project Factory, a Terraform module, provisions a GCP project, a dbt project, and three GitHub repositories for each domain from just a team name and owner email. The setup took roughly two years across three migrations, including moving the transformation layer from Dataform to dbt platform across 1,400 sources and 5,000 models without breaking downstream usage.

The results: 25 dbt platform projects and 50 licensed developers across 15 domain teams, with a secure, production-ready domain data product provisioned in minutes without Terraform knowledge. An internal developer experience survey put satisfaction at 4.6 out of 5, with time-to-insight down from weeks to hours. Trinh said the central team now spends less time on ad hoc requests and more on improving the platform itself.

Source: dbt Labs Blog