How adopting Power BI and crafting 14 custom company-wide and unit-specific dashboards empowered an IT company to fully automate data collection operations, save up to three days per month on report preparation, uncover and fix blind spots in their sales pipeline, increase post-clarification call conversions by 44%, and drive sales by 9,6% within just six months.
Domain:
Service Company (Software Engineering)
Team:
Power BI developers, DevOps engineers, QA engineers, Business Analyst, Software Architect, Project Manager
An IT provider is expected to be digital by default. But it’s impossible to become digital once and for all. The best thing you can do is to keep up with a rapidly changing world by constantly developing new solutions and improving the existing ones.
Our customer’s company was growing very fast (+30% annually) and their methods of data management and analysis were getting outdated and were no longer meeting their needs. The heads of the company felt that they did not possess the entire information about the company’s state which made the management and coordination more difficult. Such a situation could slow down the company’s growth.
The management team was really fragmented in terms of understanding the current business state. Lack of up-to-date information entailed the inability to make qualitative decisions. The company’s managers needed valuable insights on how the business was functioning, what was perfectly working, and what had to be improved. It meant quick access to real-time metrics about various aspects of the company’s state and life. It included but was not limited to project metrics, engineering power (e.g. seniority levels, the number of the developers on projects, bench status if there was any), the company’s money flow, various kinds of sales order statistics, etc.
Our customer understood that Business Intelligence is not just about using technology to bring people and information together, it’s about flexible experimentation at a rapid pace and fast decisions.
Sales & Marketing
Finance
Technical production
Human resources
Office Management
Using Power BI and cloud technologies, we’ve scaled them according to the customer’s needs. The relevant data is collected from sources, such as Jira Atlassian, Service Desk Atlassian, Confluence Atlassian, HQuickBooks, Zoho Recruit, ZOHO CRM, Closeweek, Google Sheets. Some part of this data goes straight to datasets, the other – to Azure Data Lake Storage, where all the actions described by a particular model are performed. After that, the information is presented in the dashboards. We’ve created 14 of them, which is not the final number, as, according to particular needs, the dashboards can be scaled up and down, grouped, and some derivatives can be added. Each dashboard represents an interactive analytical system and creates dozens of coherent reports with a variety of visualizations.
Our solution unifies real-time data from many sources and provides interactive, immersive dashboards for all the departments of the company: Finance, HR, Recruiting, Sales Management, Project Management, Development Units, BackOffice. Employees can easily integrate data, transform it into rich visualizations and reports, and then share those reports with stakeholders.
With this BI solution, individual employees have self-service access to intelligence that they can slice and dice in whatever ways are most helpful to them. They’ve also got an easy way to view and share their insights through interactive visualizations. It’s become possible to automate a lot of the preparation and reporting.
We have provided the decision-makers with all the metrics they need – gathered in one place – to do their job more efficiently and not have to wrangle the data to get the answers. The company’s stakeholders, managers, and decision-makers have got an opportunity to evaluate the current state of their business in a quick and reliable way.
The company got several levels of just-in-time analytics:
Each Unit got their own benefits of BI introduction into business processes.
1 / young sales managers were mentored by the experienced ones in customly defined complicated spheres;
2 / special sales courses were offered to some managers.
These measures allowed us to increase sales by 9,6% in the next 6 months.
Alignment of financial statement reporting, statutory reporting, and managerial reporting allowed to find out that the specialist of a certain proficiency level brings almost 11% less profit then specialists of other proficiency levels. It was decided to increase the amount of hiring of those specialists who bring 11% more profit to the company, rather than those who do not.
Systematic keeping control on KPIs and the ability to deliver quick financial reports to stakeholders, managers, and decision-makers allowed to identify undesirable financial expenses. The improvements made to avoid the expenses helped the company to save 84K within the next 6 months.
Power BI
SQL Server
NoSQL database
data models
ETL (Extract, Transform and Load)
OLAP
REST
R
Python
JavaScript
Azure Data Lake
