From 60 individual dashboards to one central environment

Challenge

The reporting landscape ran on QlikView, an environment that was no longer being further developed. In practice, this meant that no new reports were developed and departments kept their own Excel files.

The underlying Oracle processes processed approximately 50 million rows every night. As a result, it took until late in the morning before the data was up-to-date and loading processes regularly got stuck.

In addition, a shared definition of concepts was lacking, causing departments to use different numbers and definitions.

Solution

One central reporting environment

More than 60 dashboards have been redeveloped and integrated into Power BI, connected to the Oracle Data Warehouse. Since then, management and operations work from the same source, with the same definitions.

A foundation that keeps up

Within the Oracle Data Warehouse, data modeling, ETL processes, and source data processing have been revised. Daily processing went from approximately 50 million to 30,000 rows, a 97 percent reduction in processing time. In practice, this means the data is ready every morning, both for the office in the Netherlands and in India.

The organization itself at the wheel

In addition to the technology, the data organization has been professionalized with a governance framework, improved integrations, API connections, and gateways. More importantly for daily practice: due to a simplified data structure, much less knowledge is required to develop. As a result, 8 employees could be trained to build reports themselves and 199 colleagues to work with them.

What has changed in daily practice

• Reporting questions previously remained unresolved. Now they are solved in a few days, often by someone in the department itself

• Departments now steer daily on proper KPIs instead of monthly in retrospect

• Discussions about which number is correct have disappeared, because everyone works from the same model

Result

For the organization

• 199 employees work with the same figures daily, of which 8 develop reports themselves

• New questions are answered internally instead of outsourced or postponed

• One shared definition of concepts, meaning figures are no longer up for discussion

Technical

• More than 60 dashboards migrated to Power BI

• 97 percent reduction in processing time, from approximately 50 million to 30,000 rows per day

• Governance framework and scalable architecture for further growth