Improving Forecasting & Reporting with Corporate Business Intelligence Stand-Up
The Situation
A large cybersecurity company completed four acquisitions in rapid succession and only loosely integrated the financial and reporting processes of each of the target entities. Therefore, financial consolidation and reporting regularly involved highly manual and time-consuming processes that required the attention of several members of the Company’s Accounting and Finance teams, along with additional third-party resources. Data was spread across various silos, and the Company lacked a singular and consistent source of truth. Accordion was engaged to provide leadership and technical expertise for the stand-up of a Corporate Business Intelligence function, which would assist the Company with consolidating information across data silos and streamlining financial and KPI reporting.
Services
Business Intelligence & Big Data Analytics
Finance/Accounting Process Automation
The Execution
- Established an official Corporate Business Intelligence Group, incorporating two existing sales operations employees along with the Accordion team.
- Partnered with Accounting, Finance, and IT groups to identify source systems of interest to consolidate into a data lake.
- Determined the desired KPIs and key dimensions of analysis (e.g., channel, geography, product, etc.) in conjunction with senior leadership.
- Built out a data lake on Microsoft Azure and developed automated aggregation scripts to consolidate information across 25 source systems.
- Leveraged the data lake to deploy a data warehouse on Snowflake, applying data transformation and business logic for consolidation and reporting.
- Deployed Power BI Premium for automated dashboard reports, as well as an Excel “cube,” all leveraging the Snowflake data warehouse.
- Addressed various data quality and data completeness issues via a thorough review of various underlying contracts, invoices, and source systems.
The Results
Accordion played a pivotal role in establishing a business intelligence capability at the Company, resulting in significant financial consolidation and reporting time savings and a single source of truth. The Company now has a consolidated data set for running queries and analyzing business trends, which historically was not feasible without manual spreadsheets. The Company’s core data set of top-line performance (e.g., billings, revenue, ARR) is now available daily and includes 17 million rows of invoice line detail, and company-wide usage of the Power BI dashboards and Excel cube rapidly expanded within a few months of roll-out. The data warehouse and cubes have been instrumental in enabling customer-level analysis to improve forecast accuracy and enable timely financial and KPI reporting.