Problem
A top US recruiting firm needed more from their data.
They wanted to modernize their executive and operational reporting, moving their current process away from manual custom reporting provided by a third-party SaaS company.
Their most significant pain points included:
- Expense of the outsourced reporting
- Delivery lead times for reports ranged from 7-10 days
- Manual workaround to move data from system to system
Since no native integrations existed, modernizing reporting with flexible visuals and reports would not be a simple project. Their legacy BI tool provided only canned insights. There needed to be more flexibility to build expanded reports.
The GadellNet Strategic Services team developed a platform to meet the following requirements:
- Architect a modern analytics solution
- Automate reporting processes
- Provide business insights not possible via outdated reporting tools
- Make data accessible to end users anytime, anywhere.
Solution
GadellNet reviewed key business drivers, performance management processes, KPI management, and report delivery to create a tailored solution to meet this firm’s needs.
GadellNet’s team built an ETL process to extract the data and load it into an Azure SQL database. This would address the lack of third-party tools with native integrations to the firm’s core applications. The integration runs multiple times daily, ensuring reports always have the latest data.
In short, GadellNet created integrations allowing the firm’s data to run through Azure, making reporting easy, flexible, and automated. This also helped the firm eliminate bad data loading into the customized BI solution.
The firm was already an Office365 subscriber and Power BI was included in their licensing. So GadellNet focused on helping the firm leverage a tool they already used. This meant reporting and visualizations were available to end users anytime, from anywhere, at no additional licensing cost.
These solutions came together through the careful work of GadellNet’s Strategic Consulting team. These individuals have the expertise to understand how to turn a firm’s goals into custom solutions that will serve them for years.
Results
GadellNet’s team was able to do much more than replicate legacy reporting through a review of the current process within the framework of the desired business outcome. The firm now has enhanced data integrity, a better understanding of core business systems, and new insights through improved data management and visualization.
Key wins include:
- Prioritized time and resources based on the most critical parts of their business
- Improved decision-making using real-time data
- Created scalable analytics framework leveraging Microsoft Cloud
- Built targeted Power BI Dashboards supporting specific teams in the firm
- Set email notification capabilities via Power BI[RR1] [MG2] [MG3]
- Generated on-demand reporting access via the web
- Created a platform used for performance management and deeper insights into business operations
Testimonial
“We came out of [the pandemic shutdown] in good shape only because of the sophistication of the data in front of us.”
Vice President of Marketing & Technology