A Data Analytics Solution for the Entire Company

The goal of the project was to establish a robust, secure, and flexible Power BI platform to solve the problem of making actionable insights available to the entire company. BDO Digital assisted in the transformation by addressing the need to extract and automate data from the company’s existing sources into a highly scalable data warehouse. Once the data pipeline had been created, BDO Digital helped define the organization’s unique use cases to establish the architecture of their Power BI solution. Leadership teams needed to not only see how much budget was being spent but where that budget was being allocated.

In order to enhance analytics and reporting capabilities, BDO Digital built a monthly customized report in Power BI to help the organization make faster decisions with real-time updates. With Power BI in place, employees across departments could drill down to uncover valuable insights through interactive dashboards. A click on a particular data item would automatically update all other items on the dashboard to reflect that choice.

Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Decision-Making

With the new technology in place, the manufacturing company was poised to start leveraging their data in ways that were never possible before. However, there was one critical final step before the company could deem the project a success – and that was to ensure the users are leveraging the solution to their full potential.

While the very nature of Power BI is to provide a user-friendly interface that puts data analytics in the hands of everyone, the company recognized that the initial transition would be a much different end-user experience. BDO Digital implemented a series of user enablement trainings and resources to ensure that the adoption phase was seamless for the organization.

While users were able to quickly learn how to leverage the existing Power BI dashboards to understand spending and expense, one of the most impactful outcomes of the enablement training phase was the “dashboard of the day” workshop which showed users how to create insights in other areas of the business to which they didn’t have visibility before. This empowered employees to take control of their data by pursuing new insights that could improve decision-making without the need for IT intervention. This not only led to a better use of everyone’s time but also ignited a movement of data analytics that continues to this day as the organization looks for new ways to improve performance and gain competitive advantage.

Plans for the Future

Looking ahead, the company is excited about expanding a partnership with BDO Digital – with plans to implement a “Power BI Community” within the organization that will continue to foster a culture of data-driven decision-making. Additionally, they are looking to develop a Power BI utilization report to further optimize their analytics by seeing how people are using the tools to make decisions around governance and enhancements.

With a strong foundation built in Power BI, the company is excited about continuing the movement towards becoming a data-driven organization.