Turning Stale Data into Direct, Daily Insights with Power BI

GOING DEEPER ON THEIR CHALLENGE

A large international organization was encountering difficulty managing performance reporting, posing a risk to the business and a $40M+ group of programs.

Their reporting processes were siloed and being managed by individual business leaders without the oversight of IT. The monthly dashboards being produced were populated from 70+ SAS and SQL scripts, many of which were generated from manually entered data in Excel spreadsheets. This resulted in reporting that was ‘stale’ and not providing leadership with timely insights to their business.

When the teams managing the reporting process were transitioned to focus their resources on other strategic initiatives, the program performance dashboards and reporting process needed attention.

UNDERSTANDING DATA IDEOLOGY’S SOLUTION

The Data Ideology team led an in-depth discovery session with the various business stakeholders to understand their future-state systems and reporting requirements.

A critical step to this evaluation was conducting a detailed analysis of the data required to populate the dashboards and to ensure current data could be acquired and automated, streamlining the process.

Data Ideology’s data engineers created a data model that could automatically populate the dashboard on a daily basis. An automated data feed was created into a centralized data model, leveraging modern data warehousing best practices, which allowed us to deliver timely and accurate insights on program performance.

Data Ideology’s centralized data model, enabled Microsoft Power BI to provide the appropriate analytics for the end users. We then worked with both the business and IT to ensure that the solution’s architecture and management had adequate internal support from IT.

THE RESULT

Data Ideology enabled the client to strategically manage and mitigate risk of these critical clinical, customer, and operational programs by automating data integration, data management, and data visualization.

The client now has direct insight into program performance and can make appropriate resource allocations based on utilization.

Deploying monthly dashboards via Microsoft Power BI has given the client more control over how data and analytics are shared, as well as the ability to analyze program costs more forensically.

Initial project goals look to reduce program costs by two percent, equaling $800k annually in addition to the permanent reallocation of business resources resulting in another $500k in annual savings.