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Customer background
Our client specializes in providing turnkey solutions to some of North America’s largest telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon. They specialize in a variety of areas, including fiber to the home, directional drilling, aerial, and underwater construction.
By continuously analyzing and identifying industry requirements and trends, as well as implementing advanced and cost-effective technologies, the client has established itself as a top player in the industry. The client strives to deliver exceptional workforce and service that meets the standards set by their parent company as one of the 200+ subsidiaries of a Fortune 500 EPC company operating in North America and Australia.
Their challenges
In order to make better business decisions, the company requires management reports on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and ad hoc basis. Our client inputs real-time data such as employee information, project status, and completion data into Vitruvi and QuickBase. With a field workforce of 500 employees, contractors, and subcontractors working on multiple projects, management requires weekly, monthly, quarterly, and ad hoc reporting to track project progress, resource utilisation, inventory, and payroll. The data from these applications is extracted using custom Python code and APIs and transformed into insightful Power BI reports.
The existing code flow and lack of reliability resulted in long run-time and occasional memory issues, making debugging time-consuming. Furthermore, the reporting was closely linked with the source data dump, resulting in a lack of standard data warehousing and data mart layer, affecting maintainability and data uniformity across multiple reports. Furthermore, dashboards for end-to-end ETL process monitoring were lacking, and a large percentage of the reports used were flat-table structures designed for export with minimal visualization, resulting in long visual loading times.
Finally, there were gaps in the existing applications’ capabilities, resulting in data blind spots in inventory management analysis. There was no information on the amount of inventory in individual warehouses or in the possession of subcontractors, resulting in inefficiency in PO generation and chargeback processes.
Our Solution
With careful consideration, our team evaluated the challenges and replaced the data extraction process from Vitruvi and Quick Base apps to Dell Boomi for data integration, reducing custom coding and increasing data security. As a result, improved ETL process monitoring with a new dashboard, reduced debugging time, and more efficient cycle processes were achieved. Power BI reports were also improved to help management make better decisions.
Our user was seen to be delighted with the report, saying, “This report looks great and will save us so much time.”
Furthermore, we used Power Apps and Power Automate to fill data gaps in inventory management, resulting in cost savings and more efficient PO generation. And, a three-layer data warehouse architecture was implemented reducing the time spent on new reporting requests and modifications by over 50%. This also reduced the time spent on data reconciliation across layers and multiple reports to nearly zero.
