|
This case study looks at how Blacklight Solutions helped one of the fastest growing providers of merchant services in the payment processing space build and deploy an enterprise-class datamart and business intelligence (BI) reporting platform.
Our customer was performing a roll-up in the payment processing space. Their employee headcount grew from less than 10 to over 500 employees in less than twelve months. In order to help manage the rapid growth and have day-to-day operational insight across their corporate metrics and key performance indicators, the CEO and CFO required an integrated set of reports and dashboards that combined data across various data sources from their external service organizations.
As this was a new company, there was no existing technical infrastructure in the form of existing processes, IT resources, or hardware infrastructure to provision or co-opt. The 3rd party data sources were dirty, inconsistent, and in a constant state of flux. The internal data sources largely consisted of manually generated spreadsheets resulting in numbers that were not reconciling and causing confusion.
The company drastically needed a reporting portal with custom dashboards for individual sales agents, territory managers, sales VP’s, and company executives. This corporate hierarchy also needed to be translated to different levels of data access based on an individual’s permissions and group affiliations.
Solution
Within 45 days Blacklight deployed the first phase of a cloud-based (AWS) reporting infrastructure that included a clustered front-end, replicated back-end databases, load balancing, and failover capabilities. This infrastructure included ETL processes that processed data from multiple data sources and then transformed the data into a dimensional model that supported pre-canned and ad-hoc reporting capabilities as well as alerting and report workflows.
Key features of this solution:
- Worked with 3rd party data providers to clean up data and provide consistent feeds
- Generated a dimensional data model and populated via ETL process
- Created a set of dashboards and reports for different constituents
- Built a custom UI for setting visibility into the data and reconciling inconsistent data
- Provided KPI’s to allow customer to manage sales teams based on sales goals
Results
Within 45 days Blacklight delivered phase 1 of the reporting infrastructure and then delivered incremental functionality every 10 to 20 business days thereafter. This approach proved to be a highly iterative, customer focused approach that reduced risk and delivered value early in the project.
The reporting portal allowed the CEO and CFO to better understand their day-to-day operations with a focus on how their day-to-day sales were impacting their performance goals for a given day, week, month, quarter, etc. This resulted in less time spent discussing conflicting numbers, the company being managed by validated metrics, and provided a platform for integration of additional company data, thus enabling a 360 degree view of business operations. |
