The Customer

Clayco is a full-service real estate development, architecture, engineering, and construction firm headquartered in Chicago with operations across the United States. The company manages the entire design-build lifecycle across industrial, commercial, residential, and institutional sectors, with 50 to 100 active job sites at any given time.

Managing that complexity requires timely, accurate data from dozens of systems. "When you're constructing $10 billion worth of data centers, hospitals, and warehouses, you must get insight from all these different applications on a daily basis, sometimes on a moment's notice," says Tom Lantzy, Vice President of Financial Planning & Analysis.

Bill Dunaway, Director of Data Engineering, leads the team responsible for delivering that data reliably. As he says, "We have a lot of systems and applications. To drive real business value across analytics, business operations, and emerging AI initiatives, we need to bring data together across all of them. That's where orchestration comes in."

The Challenge

Clayco had invested in a modern cloud data stack—Snowflake, Fivetran, Tableau, and Azure—but as the environment evolved, data wasn't always arriving when the business needed it.

For example, ERP data powering timesheets, payroll, and project tracking refreshed at most hourly, limiting the team's ability to act in real time. When pipelines failed or were delayed, issues often surfaced downstream in business processes, creating friction for payroll and project teams. In one instance, a scheduling mismatch caused a timesheets application to run on a daily cadence instead of hourly.

The underlying challenge was fragmented orchestration. Workflows relied on Windows Task Scheduler, legacy SSIS servers, and cron-based scripts. As usage grew, this mix of tools made it difficult to maintain consistent visibility, monitoring, and coordination across systems.

As Bill Dunaway sums it up, "We had the right cloud platforms in place, but not a unified way to coordinate how data moved between them."

The Solution

To begin standardizing orchestration, the team initially deployed a self-managed open-source Airflow instance as a proof of concept. As adoption grew, the self-managed approach proved difficult to scale, requiring ongoing Kubernetes and Airflow maintenance without delivering consistent visibility or reliability.

Clayco needed an orchestration solution that could scale reliably without requiring the team to operate Airflow themselves. Enter Astro, Astronomer's managed Airflow platform:

"Astronomer gave us a way to scale orchestration without taking on the operational burden ourselves. The pressure it took off our cloud infrastructure team was immense, and it quickly became one of our non-negotiables." Bill Dunaway Director of Data Engineering, Clayco

Clayco reached production on Astro in weeks through Astronomer's Kickstart onboarding program. Working hands-on with a solutions engineer, the team built initial DAGs, established architecture patterns, and quickly operationalized orchestration across core workflows.

"Astronomer's Kickstart program enabled my engineers in a way I haven't seen with any other partnership," says Bill.

Astronomer provisioned a secure Azure deployment with private connectivity and separate development and production environments, ensuring enterprise-grade security and cost control from day one.

Clayco adopted a lightweight, scalable architecture: Airflow orchestrates Fivetran ingestion and Python-based processing, while Snowflake handles compute and storage. This separation allows Astro to coordinate workflows without adding operational complexity.

The Results

With Astro in place, Clayco transformed how data moves across the business, shifting from delayed, reactive workflows to reliable, near real-time operations. The impact was felt immediately across payroll, project tracking, and financial reporting:

• 4× faster ERP sync, improving data freshness from hourly to every 15 minutes.
• 20× increase in production DAGs in one year, supporting 124,000+ monthly task executions across core business systems.
• Eliminated delayed or missed data updates and payroll-impacting failures through end-to-end visibility and alerting.
• Reduced weekly escalation calls from project teams to near zero.
• Enabled real-time visibility into job site performance, supporting better tracking of schedules, costs, and profitability.
• Shifted from time-based to event-driven pipelines, improving timeliness for payroll, project tracking, and reporting.
• Removed infrastructure burden on cloud teams, eliminating the need to manage Airflow and Kubernetes internally.

For Clayco's finance team, the impact is tangible: "Thanks to Astronomer, we can now see how active job sites are tracking against plan in real time," says Tom. "That visibility has had a direct impact on the profitability of our projects."

For the data and infrastructure teams, the shift is equally significant:

What's Next

Clayco is standardizing on Astro as its enterprise orchestration platform. Infrastructure and integration teams currently running workflows on legacy schedulers are migrating fully onto Astro, consolidating all workflows into a single, shared orchestration layer across the business. At the same time, Clayco is investing in AI-driven analytics, including deploying Claude and building a semantic layer on Snowflake.