About the Client
With more than 2,000 employees, the client is a large biotechnology/pharmaceutical enterprise located in the midAtlantic region of the United States. The Site Operations department is using Excel and Microsoft Office 365 for data analysis and distribution of business intelligence.
The Challenge
The client was looking to accelerate and improve their reporting process which was reliant on a high degree of manual work to extract, clean, and analyze data. Due to the amount of effort required, some reports were only being created quarterly or annually often making intelligence outdated. Even with the collaboration capabilities of the Microsoft Office 365 platform, email was still the primary platform for sharing and distributing reports and key metrics. A successful solution to their current process would need to reduce the amount of effort required to produce reports, decrease their reporting cycle, and improve access to the most up-to-date reports. Moreover, some of the required reports need to match standardized formats to be compatible with similar reports from other departments within the client’s organization.
The Solution
Using Microsoft Power BI, Withum developed a system to automatically pull data from its source, clean and transform the data, combine sources into a data model, then calculate and report the desired metrics. Metrics that were previously only calculated once per quarter are now available with up to date data providing more accurate information. For specific reports that required an Excel-based solution, Withum leveraged the Power BI Publisher for Excel extension, allowing excel reports to access the Power BI data model and calculated metrics.
Project Benefits
The client moved from a reporting cycle that ranged from two weeks to quarterly depending on the report, to reports and metrics as fresh as their most up-to-date data. Standardized reports no longer require additional effort to produce, but are developed alongside their internal counterparts. Reliance on email for communicating key metrics has been reduced, with improved access to reports through the Power BI platform.
Contact Us
For more information on this topic, reach out to our Digital Workplace Solutions Team.
