Case Study: WesTrac cuts dbt-failure recovery 30%+ and saves 36% annually on Astro
Key results
The challenge
WesTrac is Australia's largest authorized Caterpillar dealer. Consolidating on Snowflake exposed orchestration gaps: Azure Data Factory lacked flexibility for complex dependencies, Databricks Notebooks produced brittle code, and Snowflake Tasks could not easily trigger external jobs like dbt.
The solution
WesTrac implemented Astronomer's managed Airflow service (Astro) to orchestrate its entire pipeline from ingestion through reporting.
“Astronomer instantly became the conductor of our data orchestra, pulling all the moving parts together.”
CHChris HiddingHead of Digital, WesTrac
The results, in context
On Astro, WesTrac reported recovering from dbt job failures more than 30% faster by re-running only the failed model, along with 36% annual savings from optimized job execution and 25% savings in infrastructure-management time.