Building a Self-Service Data Analytics Platform & Fostering a Data-Driven Culture
The Situation
A $1.5B home furnishings retailer and portfolio company of a $50B private equity fund required greater visibility into drivers of sales to enable real-time actionable insights. The complicating factors included the existence of large amounts of data across disparate systems and the lack of common metric definitions. Accordion was tasked with the development and implementation of a company-wide self-service business intelligence and data analytics tool.
Services
Big Data Analytics
Stakeholder Reporting & Strategic KPI Enhancement
Business Plan Reforecasting
The Execution
- Worked closely with the Company’s FP&A, IT, merchandising, real estate, and e-commerce teams to develop a comprehensive framework and data infrastructure to analyze the root causes of sales performance.
- Ensured that this platform enabled employees across functions and departments to develop their own dashboards and insights – with the ability to drill into detail at the individual transaction and/or line-item level, slicing by date & time, channel, geography, product, customer, and other dimensions.
- Met with management across functions to align on key metric and data definitions.
- Compiled and standardized master data tables for dimensions including corporate calendar, geography, products, customers, etc.
- Guided the internal IT team in the development of the SQL Server back-end to automate daily accumulation of transactional and related data, along with its subsequent transmission and transformation into the Power BI data model.
- Designed and coded the Power BI front-end (desktop, web, and mobile) through which teams could access data and metrics and create their own dashboards.
- Delivered the self-service business intelligence platform to management and helped train their teams on its use.
The Results
With Accordion’s assistance, the Company achieved their key objectives of developing a self-service data analytics platform and implementing a data driven methodology going forward. Our team created a written sales data model with interactive dashboard capabilities – which now serves as a single source of truth for the Company’s sales/revenue KPIs, drives timely fact-based decision making, and fosters a data-driven culture. We also developed a technical framework and strategic roadmap to expand the data model to all departments and functions company-wide.