Client: Small Sales Team
Challenge: Clean contact data
A sales engineer needed to generate a list of client contacts from a haphazard customer contact log spanning the last 6 years. The list contained incomplete, out of date, and erroneous information, and several duplicates. We designed queries to identify unique contacts, collapse duplicates, and created intelligent rules to choose between conflicting information. Client received a flat file representing the best information on all contacts, and a report of any conflicts which could not be programmatically resolved.
Client: Global Chemicals Company
Challenge: Migration from old,customized system
Client was using a very old, unsupported software to track their legal matters and were using multiple work-arounds and customizations to compensate for lack of features in the software. The database schema was complicated and undocumented, with a large number of hacks made over the years.
Understanding the data and how it was used was critical to mapping the data into the new system’s schema, as well as understanding why the users needed the customizations. Once the users’ intents and needs were understood, the new schema could be adapted, and an extraction, transformation, and loading process could be designed to move the client’s data to the new system.
The new format and layout of the data allowed the client to run new reports and access their data in better and more accessible ways in the new system.
Client: International Oil Company
Challenge: Analyze data to determine solution to failures
Client had multiple remote sites around the world sending in back-up tapes to company headquarters at regular intervals. Client was experiencing a great number of failed back-ups and requested trend analysis to identify the root cause.
The trend analysis did not identify a root cause, however, analysis did reveal a mitigation. A process was developed to identify tapes which contained no good back-ups. This was incorporated into an automated report sent daily to each site, allowing them to remove these tapes from the shipping queue and be recycled in the next day’s backups.
This report saved the company over $1.2M per year, excluding international shipping costs.
Client: Global Exploration Company
Challenge: No insight into employee performance
Client had a system which tracked the development, QA, and deployment of applications across over 100,000 PCs, but could not access or utilize the data. The recently had to recall a number of applications, resulting in an unacceptable amount of user downtime. In addition, the client had no measure of the time or effort it took to create new applications, or what good looked like.
A dashboard was built to track the lifecycle of each application, visually and in realtime, allowing management to see the status of each and potential bottlenecks. While understanding the client’s needs, it became clear that the few measures had been using and the measures they requested were inadequate to track the applications and measure the related employee performance.
The full lifecycle process and existing data was analyzed and new measures were proposed to better track actual work product and quality. When these were incorporated into the dashboard, the client found it had been rewarding its lowest performing employees and penalizing its best.
Client: Large Communications Company
Challenge: New enterprise system with inadequate reporting capabilities
A large communications company had just transitioned to a new enterprise management system. Management needed to understand how the system was being used, which areas of the business were struggling with the new system, and which suppliers were complying with the new procedures. The software did not have reporting capabilities to meet management’s needs.
An automated report was created to take data from the back end of system, slice it up into relevant groups, and generate relevant metrics. This allowed client to see information at a summary level, and to drill down into the details at will.