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Client Success Story – BCG Finance Team Adopts PowerBI
Chelsea Sauder • Mar 22, 2019
Late in 2018, our longstanding client, Boston Consulting Group, reached out as one of their regional finance teams had a need for clear and concise reporting from disparate systems.
The team had an opportunity to see some of the capabilities of PowerBI as part of another project which TexasPGB delivered for their organization. Initial discussions revealed that the Finance Team had staff who were willing and had an aptitude to develop the dashboards which the organization sought. The TexasPGB team determined that the most valuable approach for this engagement would be to provide training and consultative guidance rather than services; educating members of the BCG staff so that they, as subject matter experts, could develop the most impactful data visualizations was important. As a fringe benefit, this allowed for better cost control of the project as most of the work was performed by internal resources and additionally, it ensured a sustainable operating model where the team would be largely self-sufficient after go-live.
Harrison Grubb, a key leader on the project, had the following to say about the approach and partnership between the organizations, “Having TexasPGB train us on PowerBI and the supporting ecosystem drastically cut down the time we needed from idea to launch. What made this project especially helpful was each session was tailored to our actual data, project, and problems instead of a standard case study. Additionally, our trainer from TexasPGB was very thoughtful around structuring the training sessions to build off of each other.”
The training covered numerous patterns and techniques to make the development and deployment of Financial Insight Dashboards a success. This included the creation of a sustainable process for joining financial data which originated from both accounting and planning systems, advice on the effective utilization of DAX formulas, and sessions on Dashboard Design Theory to create visually appealing dashboards which tell a clear story. Between each training session, the Finance Team would continuously improve the work-in-progress dashboards that they were creating – returning to the next session with real questions which could be resolved.
Over the course of four months, the Finance Team vastly changed the reporting landscape for an entire region of the organization, covering more than 2,500 consultants. Moving from a complex and cumbersome process which required specific finance team members in every office to each go out and pull reports from an accounting tool and generate multiple standalone files for distribution within their office to a unified process that allows centralized data management with dynamic security filtering for a single source of truth and consistent dashboard picture.
Grubb offered the following when he thought about the project, “If you think of the aggregate time this tool will save us from duplicating work across offices the training we received should have a positive ROI from the moment our solution gets rolled out. Additionally, because of this training, we’re able to take the core PowerBI skill and start to stand up additional reports that focus on.”
Would you like to have similar success when adopting new technology in your organization? TexasPGB routinely provides training and consultation for organizations of all sizes. Contact us here
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