Our client, a major player in the European tobacco industry, wanted to improve their reporting process. The firm realized that the existing reports serving the European headquarters required a lot of manual work to prepare, and their quality regularly fell short of management’s expectations and would require a better BI environment for enhanced decision-making.
The Challenge
Inadequate data quality and report refresh rate
An assessment of our client’s BI pipeline revealed that the quality and speed of business-critical reports were held back by two main issues:
- Inadequate data quality, which resulted from the lack of a central data source — some reports were pulling data directly from the source system, while others relied on temporary report-serving layers, where non-transparent transformation processes occasionally resulted in data quality degradation
- Outdated reporting production processes in certain branches, which were still Excel-based and largely manual
The Objective
Effective decision-making with improvements in data quality
The client wanted to enable timely decision-making by improving the speed and quality of reporting. As accurate data is essential to effective reporting, a major step was to improve data quality.
The Solution
Implementing an improved BI strategy
The client chose to implement a new, comprehensive BI strategy to improve operations from data delivery to report building.
- HCLTech identified ETL issues and definitions for certain KPI and dimensions as the causes of data quality degradation was primarily due to a lack of standardized definitions
- Introduced data use based on the client’s global data warehouse instead of the direct use of different source systems
- Developed new general BI concepts and rules to introduce a reporting governance framework
- Reverse-engineered the production process of eCommerce reports to map and reviewed the various steps involved and used the insights gained through this review to optimize report production following the new reporting governance framework
- The solution also introduced Power BI as a standardized data visualization platform
- Finally, after revamping eCommerce reports, we leveraged the new framework and operating model to develop sales tracker reports
The Impact
Efficient and timely business decisions
The solution enabled the client’s management to make better-informed and more timely business decisions based on accurate and easily accessible data. With the introduction of Power BI-based automated daily report generation instead of the earlier time-consuming, manual reporting process, reporting staff could now handle higher value-added tasks — by not having to manually extract the necessary data and build reports on a case-by-case basis, they can now dedicate their time to extract insights from data and communicate them effectively.
