Case Studies

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Building a Data Warehouse with Azure SQL DB

This customer is a medium-sized manufacturing business that relies heavily on data-driven insights to make informed decisions on all aspects of their business. They were struggling with slow and inefficient reports when trying to import data directly from Dynamics NAV into Power BI.

The customer was finding it difficult to build reports due to the complexity of the data model, and the reports they were generating were not meeting their needs, often containing erroneous data. They needed a more efficient and scalable solution that resolved the errors, would allow them to store and access historical data, and could also integrate data from other sources when required.

Business decision-making with Power BI

Case Study - Transforming business decision-making with Power BI

What if you have a wealth of data but it’s all coming from disparate sources, and the process of extracting any meaningful insight is arduous? You’re losing critical time and money, and left unable to make informed business decisions. The Institute of Quarrying (IQ) was struggling with exactly this issue.

The IQ has been supporting people working in the mineral products industry for more than a century. It’s a professional body providing accreditation, development and support to over 5,000 members of the mineral extraction industry. And while the organisation generates huge amounts of data from a wide range of sources, the team was struggling to access and analyse it in a meaningful and effective way.

So they enlisted PTR to help transform their global data management system.

Microsoft BI Strategy Support

Use case – Planning a journey to data driven decision making

Our client is a retail organisation with a vision of achieving better data driven decision making across the business with a top down approach enabled through engaging, insightful and interactive dashboards.

With an extensive Microsoft based data estate already including an on-premise Dynamics AX deployment and a SQL Server Data Warehouse, and a suite of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports consuming data from the data warehouse a Microsoft data platform was an obvious choice. Our client also had a strong desire to migrate from an on-premise data centre to a cloud based data centre
 

The objective for a new BI solution was to provide both a self-service BI solution and a suite of purpose designed dashboards. Self-service BI that encouraged the questioning of data, and the use of the data to implement visual story telling to unearth insights into the data and business behaviour (such as seasonal trends, best sellers, promotion success, stock fulfillment patterns, customer patterns) and help drive better business decisions. Purpose built dashboards presenting key performance indicators for senior management enabling them to gain a 360 view of the business and drill down to uncover the stories behind the KPIs.

In addition to the technical solution required to deliver a data driven BI solution our client required help and support in achieving buy in from the business and senior management, and engaging key stakeholders to promote the benefits of interactive, top down visualisation approaches to data anlysis.

Data Platform - Building An Azure Data Hub

Use case – Building An Azure Data Hub for BI & Data Science

Our client is a retail organisation, seeking to future proof their Data platform to provide greater accessibility to their data for a wider of range of reporting, analysis, and potential Data Science requirements.

They have significant experience with traditional Relational Database Data Warehouses and reporting with On-Premise SQL Server deployments through SSRS and more recently with Power BI against a freshly developed Hybrid Cloud Data Warehouse implementation.

They are eager to future proof their investment data to make their data more accessible for both internal and external analysts and to embrace current technology trends particularly with regards to Data Lakes, Big Data analytics, and Machine Learning and Data Science

Data Strategy Solution - Business Wide View

Use case – Engaging 360 view dashboards from disparate data sources

Our client is a retail organisation, making use of several well-established online services to fulfil their order & stock management, Point of Sale, Buying and Purchase Order Processing requirements both online and in store, in addition to numerous online marketing and advertising platforms.

As such they have a wealth of data available to them, however currently many of their processes for handling and manipulating that data are very manual and time consuming, incurring a high level of human effort concentrated on a small number of people and meaning that more time is spent preparing data for reports than can meaningfully be spent analysing their output.

They wished to streamline the process for collecting and preparing this data so that they could reverse that time balance and relate all these disparate data sources together to get a true business wide view of their data, whilst also improving the quality and user engagement of these reports.

Data Strategy Platform Solutions - BI Membership Engagement

Use case – KPI Dashboards Driving Decisions for Membership Organisations

Our client is a membership organisation, and struggled with achieving accurate and consistent membership retention and engagement data analysis through manually maniplulated reports implementing different business logic to present Key Performance Inidicators across different sections of the organisation. More time was spent in collating data, validating and correcting data, and preparing reports than was spent using the reports for analysis and driving business decisions.

Membership Organisations have myriad ways in which they connect with, and collect data from, their members such as subscriptions, publications, events, training and professional development schemes. An effective and reliable Business Intelligence solution is vital to ensure that they can connect all these disparate data sources to provide insight in to Membership engagement and facilitate the measurement of targeted activity and results based goals with regards to Member acquisition, retention, and attrition so they can better gain, retain, and serve their members.

The objective for this solution was to architect a new data platform to streamline the process for collecting and preparing this data so that they can reverse that time balance and get a true business wide view of their data to enable more time for analysing and driving business decisions.

Data Strategy Platform Solutions - On-Premise to Azure

Use Case – On-Premise BI to Azure Migration

Our client is highly data driven, however processes for handling and manipulating data are very manual and potentially error prone and time intensive.

The objective for this solution was to Overhaul and markedly improve on the existing On-Premise SQL server stack reporting and business intelligence function.

Data was to be integrated into a central Data Warehouse from data sources such as SAP and various on-premise and cloud hosted Transport, Logistics, CRM, Quality Control and Production systems, and a single authoratative source of truth built to enable a business wide view through through rich and engaging visualisations.

Data Strategy Platform Solutions - Data Integration and One Truth Repository

Use Case – Data Integration and One Truth Repository

Our client currently produces reports in tools such as Excel and PowerPoint for many reporting requirements, pulling dta manually from data sources such as Financial, CRM and Audit systems. This is labour intensive, time consuming and error prone, as well as resulting in visualisations that are not engaging and effective.

The objective for this solution was to architect a new business intelligence platform to streamline the process for collecting and preparing this data, centralising the storage of the data, improving the development and deployment life cycle of reports, and to produce rich, visually compelling and interactive reports that can be embedded within bespoke applications.

Dynamic Dashboards and Reports - Supply Chain Analysis

Integrating Data To Present Critical Business KPIs

Building trustworthy, integrated, one truth, suites of financial reports and dashboards for the Retail world can be incredibly challenging as data must often be collated and related from many different applications and data sources. PTR work with clients to pull their data from many different on-premise and cloud server based systems such as Oracle, Dynamics, SAP, SQL Server as well as more personal data sources such as Excel workbooks, to create a central repository of quality, related data from which we build customised, client specific dashboards to assist with timely and well-informed business decisions.

Dynamic Dashboards and Reports - Financial Analysis

PTR the go to choice for Financial Dashboard & Reporting Solutions

Businesses face many challenges when trying to build trustworthy, one truth, suites of financial reports and dashboards as data must be integrated from many different sources. PTR work with many clients who struggle with building accurate dashboards refelcting key performance metrics such as profitability, cash flow, budget variance and so on, because their data is spread across the likes of Sage, Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, Excel workbooks. We help to bring all of that data together as single quality data source and then build tailored dashboards to reflect the KPIs that are most important and relevant to their business.

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