Maintel

Business Intelligence Support & Development

Maintel provides managed cloud communications services for both the public and private sectors, helping their customers to improve their business through digital transformation. Through Maintel support and assistance, customers can be more effective and productive with digital workplace technology as well as gain the ability to acquire, develop and retain their own customers through customer experience technology. They also ensure customers can always connect to their applications and data through secure connectivity.

Maintel asked Dolphin to assist in the consolidation of their legacy reports, requiring a solution that automated the Power BI data model and provided a single source of truth for the business. A single reporting suite was then required over this data model that would service the needs of users within the organization, providing dynamic reporting according to their role within the organization.

The Solution

To develop the solution, Dolphin first set about consolidating the existing reporting into one single Power BI data model rather than multiple models with overlapping data. In this way, Dolphin were able to reduce the amount of data refreshes being called from the PBI service and also standardize the reporting performed by the business.

With a single Power BI data model in place, Dolphin then built in a security model utilizing row level security (RLS) which provides the ability to grant different users access to the same data model, yet restrict their view of the data according to their role. In this way, sales teams are now able to see their own sales figures while at the same time management can see a complete picture.

However, data alone was not the only requirement. Different teams needed different views, from high level management reports through to granular contractual reports. By building a dynamic menu system, Dolphin was able to create a suite of reports that catered to the needs of the various different users, all within the same reporting suite.

In addition to a dynamic reporting suite, Dolphin also delivered a dashboard containing key figures, emailed to the relevant business stakeholders daily. This enables key business users to see opportunities at the start of the day and plan accordingly without the need to even open their computer. The dashboards were optimized to run on both computer and mobile devices with visuals chosen to compliment the native screen.

A second phase to the reporting suite saw Dolphin extend the data model and add an additional suite of reports, this time focused around identifying technology trends. By taking their own data and calculating the value of contracts at any given date, we were able to deliver a report that showed senior level management how the technologies they sell are performing and in what direction they are trending. This enables strategic decisions based on actual data, refreshed on a daily basis.