Data at scale: How to manage increasing client data onboarding volumes during rapid growth?

Typically, as organizations grow, their data grows too. Managing this data can become increasingly complex for a variety of reasons. It’s not just about storage or speed; it’s about ensuring that workflows are reliable, flexible, and capable of delivering accurate data consistently.

3 common client data onboarding challenges faced by growing companies:

• Increasingly diverse data formats: Clients and systems generate data in a wide range of structures. As organizations grow, this diversity makes standardization, validation, and processing more challenging, requiring workflows that can adapt to new formats without disrupting existing pipelines.
  
  

• Data quality issues: Errors can have operational or financial consequences, especially as a larger volume of data could result in longer troubleshooting or error detection times.
  
  

• Seamless integration with new systems: As data volumes continue to rise, connecting pipelines to modern platforms such as Kafka is becoming increasingly complex. This is usually because integrating new systems often requires coordinating different data formats, protocols, and operational requirements. This adds further layers of complexity and testing.

Scaling client data onboarding: 3 strategic approaches

Meeting these demands can require a new approach to onboarding data. For example, decision makers for data teams might decide to: 

Approach 1:

Equip more teams across the business to give a helping hand. For example, empowering non-technical teams with the tools and visibility to manage parts of the data workflow, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating client onboarding. 

Approach 2:

Bring in more automation. Free up teams with automated pipelines and validation processes that handle repetitive tasks, improve accuracy, and scale workflows without adding manual effort. 

Approach 3:

Adopt a hybrid approach. Combine team empowerment with plug-and-play automation processes to allow business teams to manage domain-specific transformations while engineers focus on reusable, scalable pipelines and integration with modern platforms. 

How CloverDX enables these approaches: 

CloverDX is a comprehensive data management platform that provides the tools and automation needed to handle growing client onboarding volumes with accuracy and speed. To help teams work efficiently and scale operations, CloverDX offers several key capabilities:

• Visual Business Tools: Drag-and-drop interfaces allow less technical business users to handle data mapping, validation rules, and transformations without writing code. I.e. Business analysts or admins can help keep client data flowing through pipelines by managing client-specific parts of the onboarding process, eliminating the engineering bottleneck.
  
  Learn more about CloverDX’s Business Tools here

• Automated Workflow Orchestration: Built-in scheduling, file detection, error handling, and monitoring ensure pipelines run reliably around the clock. Exception handling provides clear diagnostics when human intervention is needed, rather than silent failures that cascade through systems.

• Reusable Pipeline Components: Engineers build scalable, production-grade pipelines once, which business users can then extend to solve specific client needs. This approach eliminates one-off code and reduces technical debt.

• Cross-Team Visibility: Comprehensive monitoring and reporting give all stakeholders — not just engineers — visibility into data operations health, client status, and processing metrics. This democratizes data operations knowledge across the organization.

• Modern Integration Capabilities: Native connectors and flexible architecture support integration with platforms like Kafka, Snowflake, and cloud services, enabling gradual migration to modern data infrastructure without disrupting existing client workflows.

Fig A: Example of building data transformation steps without code in CloverDX Wrangler.

Real-world examples of companies adopting these data onboarding approaches: 

FIA Tech: Empowering multiple teams to work together on data onboarding  

FIA Tech, a financial services technology platform used by thousands of firms worldwide, provides clients with near real-time trade data to reconcile transactions faster, reduce operational risk, and maintain transparency across the trade lifecycle. 

To manage this at scale, FIA Tech faced challenges including diverse client data formats, high-volume streams, and the need for rapid onboarding without disrupting existing workflows.  

The Solution:

FIA Tech addressed these challenges by empowering customer-facing teams to manage incoming client data formats and standardize them independently, without relying on Engineering support. Meanwhile, engineers focused on building robust, reusable, and scalable pipelines, automating complex onboarding processes, and ensuring smooth, hands-off, near real-time data processing across all client systems. 

IT Architect Developer

George Mohr

Head of Software Engineering, FIA Tech

“We can take a generic graph that does all the key workflow features, and the Operations team can take the client-specific transformation aspect, all in one platform and without having to reinvent the wheel.”

The Results:

• Seamless collaboration: Teams across FIA Tech can now work together more effectively across roles. Developers and IT focus on system robustness, operations, and reliability, while business users independently configure and manage data format mappings without engineering support. 
  
  
• Scalability is no longer a concern: High-volumes of client data are now being processed smoothly and consistently, without slowing down operations, or requiring manual intervention due to CloverDX’s automations. 
  
  
• Accelerated client data onboarding: Client data onboarding is now faster, ensuring FIA Tech’s clients receive their data on time, anda SLAs are consistently met.

Sisk Fulfilment Services: Eliminated late night data processing by introducing round-the-clock automations 

Sisk Fulfillment Services manages around 4.5 million shipments a year for dozens of clients. As their business expanded, their operations team faced increasing pressure to handle complex, high-volume data processes efficiently. Manual data validation and file processing were time-consuming and limited scalability, prompting Sisk to look for a more automated, reliable solution to support their continued growth. 

The Solution:  

To address this, Sisk adopted the automation side of this approach using CloverDX. In particular, automated workflows now manage incoming file detection, data mapping, error checking, and client notifications — removing manual steps, minimizing errors, and freeing the team to focus on quality and data integrity. 

The Results:  

• Eliminated manual effort: CloverDX automations now trigger data onboarding immediately when customers upload files, freeing business users to independently manage processes while developers and IT focus on maintaining system robustness, reliability, and smooth operations. 

• Improved data quality: Automated error handling detects and corrects file inconsistencies before they impact downstream processes, allowing business users to work self-sufficiently while IT ensures overall system reliability and operational stability. 

Learn more how Sisk Fulfilment Services eliminated manual data steps through automation with CloverDX. 

Zywave: Freed up a third of engineers' time through data automation 

This is another prime example of using automation to streamline data workflows. 

Zywave, an InsurTech company providing agencies and insurance firms with sales, client delivery, content, and analytics tools, faced the challenge of onboarding new customers which became increasingly manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors. 

The Solution:

By automating the process with CloverDX, Zywave built workflows that handle repetitive migration steps, from staging to production, so engineers can push a button and trust the process. Complex onboarding steps that previously required careful manual coordination are now orchestrated automatically, with built-in validation ensuring reliability. 

Bryan Kahlig

Senior Director, Product Development, Zywave

Stakeholder

“The onboarding process is our first chance at making a good impression with our customers after the dollars are already spent. And CloverDX gives us a tool to be able to move faster”

The Results:  

• Reduced client onboarding steps: Customer onboarding steps decreased by around 20%, making the process simpler and allowing business users to complete setup independently, while IT and engineering ensure the underlying systems remain robust and reliable.

• Freed up engineering time: Automation and streamlined workflows have freed up approximately one-third of engineering time previously spent on repetitive tasks, enabling developers to focus on system reliability and strategic improvements.

• More time to focus on innovation: Engineers can now dedicate their efforts to product development and innovation, while business users manage routine processes independently, ensuring both operational efficiency and technical excellence.

PeopleInsight by HireRoad: Automated onboarding of HR client data to save time, reduce errors, and scale with ease

PeopleInsight is a cloud-based HR SaaS platform that helps companies manage and consolidate HR data. As they grew, manual client onboarding consumed enormous resources, and visibility into data operations was limited to engineers, creating information bottlenecks that slowed the entire organization. 

The Solution:

The team adopted CloverDX to automate repetitive client data onboarding tasks while giving everyone across the business visibility into customer data workflows, not just engineers. Automated workflows handle ingestion, validation, transformation, and publishing, eliminating manual work. 

The Results:

• Clear monitoring and reporting: CloverDX’s visual interfaces and reporting tools give all teams — business users, IT, and engineering—a transparent view of successes and failures across clients. This shared visibility makes data onboarding predictable, scalable, and easier for each role to manage effectively.
• Tripled customer base without increasing headcount or resources:
  By combining automation with streamlined processes, FIA Tech scaled operations efficiently. Business users manage routine tasks independently, while IT and engineering maintain system reliability and operational excellence.
• 45–60 minutes saved per client, per day: Automations have removed the need for manual intervention, freeing business users to focus on higher-value tasks and allowing engineering teams to concentrate on maintaining robust, reliable systems.

Learn more about PeopleInsight’s journey to scalable, automated HR data management.

Scaling data onboarding with confidence 

As these examples show, whether through automation, team empowerment, or a hybrid of both, organizations can manage growing volumes of complex client data while maintaining accuracy and speed. CloverDX provides the flexibility, visibility, and reliability needed to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and enable cross-team collaboration. 

By combining tools that eliminate manual data onboarding steps with data transformation solutions that offer intuitive interfaces for business users, companies can scale onboarding processes, maintain high data quality, respond to clients more efficiently and build smoother, more reliable data operations that can grow in line with business demands.