“Fulton Analytics has been great to work with and I see a continued partnership where Fulton Analytics helps us architect the right foundation for our analytics strategy””
The IT Director of a Minnesota based manufacturing company shared these words of appreciation after Fulton Analytics deployed a Power BI business analytics solution focused on providing deeper insights across their sales organization. The $50 million dollar, St. Paul based manufacturer was looking for deeper insights into sales and product trends after recently expanding their offerings into cutting edge areas of IoT, RFID, and digital labels.
Selecting the right business analytics platform was critical for monitoring real-time performance across new product lines and customer segmentation. The company was also looking to reduce the number of manual Excel reports across the organization and provide interactive data reporting to executive stakeholders. The Power BI solution our team deployed provided the ability for Sales and Finance leadership to drill-into product trends and slice by sales performance and profit margin. These capabilities were the building blocks for the organization to embrace data-driven decision making.
High Value & Budget Conscious
With the support of the VP of Sales, Fulton Analytics deployed a Power BI reporting solution in just 2-weeks. After an initial Data Strategy Session, our team started building a Power BI solution to unlock key insights across the sales organization. The company was in the midst of a large scale Epicor ERP upgrade, which limited the budget and resources available for other projects. This was a major consideration for our team. From day one, our team was focused on building a solution that could provide immediate value, yet fully integrate with their completed Epicor ERP solution.
Technology Selection
The company had already begun to explore Power BI as a business analytics platform, but had questions around best-practices and platform limitation. With their existing SQL Server infrastructure and deep knowledge Excel, Fulton Analytics recommended that Power BI was the right platform. Our team concluded that Power BI was the right tool based on overall features, ease of use, and product cost. Gartner recently named Power BI the leader in it’s Magic Quadrant based on these same criteria.
Zebra BI Custom Visualization
As we looked to optimize the data visualizations for the solution, out team achieved a major breakthrough with Power BI custom visualizations produced by Zebra BI. The Zebra BI reports (sample below) allows finance leaders to drill into sales performance and slice by prior year, rolling 30-60-90, sales delta, YTD sales, and top performing sectors. Implementing Zebra BI reduced the number of man-hours it would have taken to write custom DAX formulas and measures. This allowed our team extra time to ensure the quality of the centralized data model. Building a quality data model is the key to any Power BI project. Zebra BI was a key component and allowed our team to deliver maximum value to the company in just 2-weeks.
End Results
Sales are the engine of every organization. The Power BI solution deployed by our team increased speed to insight across product trends and sales performance. The ability to drill into these real-time insights provided immediate value for sales leadership and enhanced forecasting for executive stakeholders. In just 2-weeks, Fulton Analytics was able to deploy a Power BI solution designed to scale along with the company’s Epicor ERP roll out. The overall solutions met the success criteria defined by the company:
Identify real-time trends across product performance and new product
Select platform to reduce manual Excel reporting and data mashup
Provide a modern interactive business analytics dashboard
Ability to drill into rolling Sales, Margin, Gross Profit % by customer or product
Enhance sales performance by identifying leading indicators of success
Every company’s journey to data success looks a little different. At Fulton Analytics, our commitment to each of our clients is deliver value in an agile manner with the client’s best interest in mind. Our consumption based framework ensures we are meeting the business needs and helping our clients achieve data-driven success.
Success Story: Analytics Power Popular Minneapolis Retail Brand
Robert Gerads is CEO of Fulton Analytics, a data analytics strategy and consulting firm based in St. Paul, MN. He is also the founder of the Twin Cities Power BI Meetup.