BI Solution to Control Financial Data Flows and Speed up Reporting by 90%
Summary
ScienceSoft designed a BI solution for Alta Resources, a global customer service outsourcing company, and built its financial analytics and invoicing modules.
About Alta Resources
The Customer is Alta Resources, an outsourcing provider with more than 3,000 employees that specializes in customer experience management, including outsourced call center services. Alta Resource’s clients are renowned companies in retail, IT, healthcare, insurance, entertainment, etc. With headquarters and a fulfillment facility in Neenah, Wisconsin, Alta Resources has additional operations in the United States, the Philippines, Belize, and Mexico.
With no transparent analytics and reporting processes set in place, Alta Resources needed a tech partner to design a business intelligence solution and implement it in iterations.
Business Intelligence Consulting
To get a 360-degree view on the as-is state of Alta Resources’ analytics and reporting processes, ScienceSoft’s consultants held in-person interviews with key project stakeholders (CEO, CIO, Director of Care Service Line, etc.), conducted brainstorming sessions and workshops, and analyzed the provided documentation. After that, Alta Resources got a concept of the solution to get data-driven insights for tactical and strategic decision-making, planning, and performance management. The solution would address the following issues: error-prone manual data extraction and processing, unconsolidated data, random reporting, insecure data sharing, etc. The key components would be:
- Data warehouse – data storage for all aggregated data.
- Analytics services – MOLAP cubes and ML models to enable in-depth data analysis.
- Reporting tools – for business users to create reports, scorecards, and dashboards.
- Analytics web portal – an application for business users to communicate with a business intelligence solution.
- Client web portal – an app for Alta Resources’ clients to securely access valuable analytics insights on their customers.
The implementation of the BI solution would help Alta Resources:
- Meet daily reporting needs.
- Deliver actionable insights for all levels of Alta Resources employees in time.
- Conduct comprehensive performance assessments on different levels (corporate, department, employee, etc.).
- Accurately forecast business performance and growth, revenue gain opportunities, and revenue loss risks, optimize employee management and minimize customer churn.
- Rise data security.
- Generate additional revenue due to providing analytics services to clients, etc.
Alta Resources also got a detailed tech stack recommendation for solution development that supported their existing software licenses and would enable their in-house IT team to maintain the solution without external help.
Development of Financial Analytics and Invoicing Modules
Alta Resources decided to start the BI solution development project by implementing modules for basic financial analytics and automated customer invoicing. To fulfill the task, ScienceSoft assigned a team of a business analyst, a solution architect, two database developers, a front-end developer, and two QA engineers.
First, Alta Resources got the solution architecture designed with the following components:
- Data source layer – internal and external data sources (telephony software, CRM, financial software, the HR system, clients’ systems for tracking labor time, etc.).
- Data integration layer – to extract data from source systems (e.g., data on support agents’ calls, schedules and rates, clients’ data, paid invoices, payroll.), store it temporarily in the staging area in a raw format, and process further.
- Data warehousing layer – to store the cleansed, consolidated and structured data.
- Business intelligence layer – OLAP cubes for enabling multidimensional data processing and a web interface for:
- Creating, editing, saving, publishing, and viewing basic daily financial reports (estimated revenue, wages, revenue by program, gross margin by activity type, location, FTEs per program, activity type, etc.).
- Creating templates for customer invoices and generating invoices.
Within 10 months, Alta Resources got fully functioning modules and the supporting documents, including a software requirements specification, a UI kit, tech design, and a user manual.
Heather Owen Nigl, CFO at Alta Resources, says:
ScienceSoft’s team delivered a solution that fully aligns with our business needs. With its help, we can cut out a big amount of manual data processing flows to prepare invoices. We’ve got a powerful tool to control financial data flows, which provides us with daily financial reports on estimated revenue, wages, gross margin. We can also slice and dice our data by location, program, department, etc.
Key Outcomes for Alta Resources
- The implementation of a full-scale BI solution with self-service capabilities is estimated to save up to 90% of the report preparation time for Alta Resources’ analysts, enable data-driven decision-making, planning and performance management.
- The invoicing module that fully automates the customer invoicing process.
- Daily reporting for senior management on estimated revenue, employee wages, gross margin, etc., for increased visibility into financial operations.
- Streamlined evolution of the business intelligence solution due to its flexible architecture.
Technologies and Tools
Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Analysis Services, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Service.
