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Using an upside-down approach, a small team at a global organizational consulting firm overhauled their reporting systems and delivered interactive dashboards to industry leaders along and over 5500 users world-wide.
Challenge
The analytics project began out of frustration from their business community.
Executives used one system to see an overview of their business while Account Managers used an altogether different system to get granular information about their customers and opportunities.
Depending on the level of detail, users had to to log into two different systems.
Complexity
Aside from having to switch between two reporting platforms, executives and managers had to contend with stale information from yesterday’s data.
This made tracking new opportunities in a fast-changing market challenging.
How does a new line of business or a new customer lead compare to the history of customers in a similar market? Do I need to wait 1-2 days before the data is copied to our reporting platform? At what level of granularity can I review this information?
Solution
A successful analytics project at the global organizational consulting firm had two goals:
- One common business language
- High user adoption
To achieve the first goal of having a singular definition of enterprise key performance metrics, the firm chose SAP HANA as their unified data warehouse. This allowed real-time data to flow from their primary transaction systems into one source of truth and provide the foundation for the second goal of high user adoption.
To reach the second goal of high user adoption, the development team leveraged the dashboard capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud in an unusual way. The team understood that buy-in had to occur from the top-level industry leaders down to the everyday worker, checking on her individual performance metrics. So they did things upside-down.
Instead of asking the business community to wait weeks or months to see their dashboards, the team engaged all levels of the company with working versions of the end result.
By storing data exported from the legacy systems into SAP Analytics Cloud, the team were able to build working mockups quickly and iterate with the business, often during meetings.
With SAP Analytics Cloud, users were able to quickly visualize the information such as seeing how sales were trending for the current year and understand how well they were performing compared to the prior year.
In addition, business users were able to intuitively narrow on a customer or product offering and see their questions answered as charts and tiles quickly changed upon their interaction. This enabled industry leaders to drill down from a monthly overview to the individual supporting documents and related information.
Outcome
By using SAP Analytics Cloud as a prototyping application, the small team at the global organizational consulting firm were able to continuously gather feedback on their designs throughout the development cycle. This ensured that the final dashboards provide the right information at the right time.
Interested in seeing the dashboards we delivered for this firm? Contact me directly via email: hau@summerlinanalytics.com
I built analytical applications, dashboards, and reports for Fortune 500 companies that run on the SAP Platform.
