Meet Helix Beverages: a Data Pipeline Examples backdrop

The 10 Data Pipeline Examples share one fictitious company as a backdrop: Helix Beverages. Its systems, partners and pain points are drawn from real DataLug customer conversations. As you read each example, picture it landing on a team's desk at Helix.

Meet Helix Beverages

Helix Beverages is a mid-market North-American craft beverage company. About 1,400 employees, three production plants (Vermont, Colorado, British Columbia), distribution across the US and Canada via roughly 60 independent distributors, and a small direct-to-consumer e-commerce channel that ships in 28 states. Revenue around 380M USD annually, growing 9 to 12 percent year on year. They are not big enough to staff a dedicated integration platform team, but big enough that the spreadsheets and ad-hoc Python scripts that run the business keep breaking.

The ecosystem

Helix's reality is a textbook mid-market mix: a strong core ERP, a fast-growing CRM, partner systems that range from "modern API" to "SFTP only, no exceptions", and an analytics layer the leadership team genuinely uses.

Internal divisions

Division	Primary systems	What they care about
Sales	Salesforce (Account, Opportunity, Order, Case)	Closing deals, accurate pipeline, account hierarchy
Customer Success	Salesforce (Case, Account), MSSQL (Order history)	First-response time, churn signal, support workload
Marketing	Google Drive, Google Sheets, Dropbox (creative), HubSpot	Campaign analytics, content velocity, agency hand-off
Finance and Accounting	MSSQL (ERP), Oracle (legacy GL from 2019 acquisition)	Month-end close, AR aging, audit trail
Operations and Supply Chain	MSSQL (inventory), SFTP (distributors), AWS S3 (co-packer manifests)	On-time delivery, stockouts, plant utilization
IT and Security	Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams), Azure Blob (backups)	Identity, change management, compliance
Exec and BI	Snowflake (warehouse), Google Sheets (KPIs), Power BI (boards)	Weekly KPI review, board reporting

Strategic partners

Partner type	Examples	Protocol they prefer
Distributors	EastCoast Bev Group, Pacific Trade, Northern Tides Distribution	SFTP nightly drops of order, inventory, depletions files
Co-packers	Hudson Bottling, Cascade Canning	AWS S3 prefix per facility; manifests as JSONL
Retail buyers	A major national grocer, two regional chains, several restaurant groups	SharePoint document libraries for compliance docs, EDI through a third party for orders
Creative agencies	Two boutique studios in Toronto and Portland	Dropbox shared folders, occasional Google Drive
Ad networks	Meta, Google Ads, TikTok	API integrations via the Generic API connector
Cloud vendors	Salesforce, Snowflake, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace	Native APIs
On-call tooling	PagerDuty, SMTP for low-severity alerts	Webhook (Generic API), SMTP

End customers

Channel	Touchpoints they generate
Major retail chains	Buyer-portal orders, compliance documents, sell-through reports
Restaurants and bars	On-premise orders through distributors, occasional direct chain accounts
Direct-to-consumer	E-commerce orders (PostgreSQL event store), support cases, marketing opt-ins
Trade customers	Sample requests, tasting-event RSVPs, co-marketing brief drops

Why integration is hard for Helix

Five named problems keep coming up in their integration planning meetings. Each one is the reason at least one of the 10 examples exists.

CRM and ERP drift. Sales reps edit Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce. Customer-success agents edit the same records, then a few hours later a billing-driven update from MSSQL flips fields back. By Friday nobody trusts either system.
BI lag. Snowflake is the dashboard everyone reads, but it is loaded by an overnight batch. When a regional VP needs to know how Tuesday is going on Tuesday, the answer is always "let me get back to you tomorrow."
Partner files arrive on partner schedules. SFTP distributor drops, S3 co-packer manifests, and Drive creative deliveries all land asynchronously. Operations needs them merged and reconciled before 7am local time without anyone watching over the process.
Exec reporting lives in Google Sheets. The CEO reads the same shared Google Sheet every Monday morning, and no BI tool will replace it. The Sheet needs to be refreshed automatically from Snowflake.
Critical events go unnoticed. A transaction that fails post-settlement, a co-packer manifest that does not arrive, a Salesforce Case that hits P0: ops on-call needs to find out within minutes, in the channel they actually watch.

The Data Pipeline Examples as a Helix capability map

Each row below names a Helix problem and points at the example that solves it. The same example may show up against more than one need.

#	Example	Helix problem it addresses
1	Salesforce to Snowflake nightly sync	BI lag (problem 2): get Sales and CS dashboards into Snowflake by 06:00 local
2	Salesforce and MSSQL contact sync	CRM and ERP drift (problem 1): two-way Contact sync without losing the latest edit
3	MySQL to S3 CSV export with filter	Migrating the acquired partner ordering portal off MySQL into a normalised S3 + Snowflake stack
4	SFTP CSV to PostgreSQL with compute	Partner schedules (problem 3): land distributor inventory drops into the ops PostgreSQL store
5	Oracle ETL with DbScript prelude and cache	Bringing the legacy Oracle GL into Snowflake so Finance does not need two sets of dashboards
6	Google Drive to SharePoint file copy with fork	Compliance documents from a national retailer need to land in both the IT SharePoint and the Marketing Drive
7	PostgreSQL fan-out with filter	Critical events (problem 5): e-commerce events routed to Snowflake, S3, and on-call
8	Salesforce email digest with router	Customer Success Monday-morning case digest, sliced by region and priority
9	Snowflake to Google Sheets executive report	Exec reporting (problem 4): keep the CEO's Monday Sheet auto-fresh
10	MSSQL and Salesforce reconciliation	CRM and ERP drift (problem 1), order ledger: nightly reconciliation across the two systems of record