Innovate Services

Sales Reports Business Intelligence

Innovate Foods are a large-scale provider of school meals, preparing a variety of fresh food for children across England every day, encouraging healthy eating and trying new cuisines to expand their palette.

Innovate Foods approached Dolphin IT Solutions for a Business Intelligence solution to better report on their sales and financial data, something they had previously relied upon Microsoft Excel for. However, as the business expanded there was a clear need for a better reporting system.

Considering the Excel Integration within Power BI, which allows analytics to be run through existing Excel workbooks, Dolphin IT Solutions proposed a set of Power BI dashboards to deliver the reports from Excel, all with a modern design tailored to their business.

The Solution

To help Innovate Foods better understand and use their data, Dolphin IT Solutions developed four powerful dashboards based off the sales and financial spreadsheets from Excel. Furthermore, the set of Excel tables were transformed into graphs and charts showing performance over time.

When opening the Power BI report, the dashboards would load as a summarative overview across all the schools' performance, with filters built in to drill into the data from various angles. For example, you can filter the reports to a school / group of schools – or view an area manager's schools' performance. The opportunities for reporting had become infinite.

One additional requirement was to make the report easily to brand and update in the future. Dolphin IT Solutions delivered on this by providing documentation as to how the report was built, with instructions for re-configuring the main aspects of the report.

Overall, the project was delivered and finalised within weeks, which allowed Innovate Foods to begin their financial reports and collate end-of-year figures ahead of the end of the fiscal year.