Case Study: Swapfiets democratizes data access and governance with Atlan

How Swapfiets Uses Active Metadata to Democratize Access to Data

Swapfiets, the Netherlands-based bicycle subscription service, was seeing growing internal demand for reliable, easily accessible data as it scaled across countries and business functions. Its data team needed a better way to manage governance, improve trust in metrics, and reduce the flood of ad hoc questions about definitions, ownership, and dashboard discrepancies. To address this, Swapfiets turned to Atlan’s active metadata platform alongside its modern stack, including Snowflake, dbt, Tableau, Fivetran, and Airflow.

With Atlan, Swapfiets launched a self-service data catalog and governance program that centralized metric definitions, lineage, ownership, and sensitive-data controls across six business domains. Using Atlan Playbooks, automated enrichment, and Slack-based workflows, the team sped up documentation and routing of questions, while training programs and data champions expanded self-service access across the company. The result was a stronger culture of shared data ownership, less burden on the data team, and a measurable documentation efficiency gain of 10 to 30 minutes per metric across 125 metrics.

Swapfiets

Lisa Smits

Manager of Data & Analytics