With a data-savvy CFO leading the charge, Data-Mail understood the important role that data could play in their processes and decision making.
After attending our Dashboard in a Day event, Data-Mail had a vision for how their organization could use data and analytics to move forward and solve existing business challenges. blum worked with Data-Mail to demonstrate the advantages that big data and analytics could bring to their organization along with some of the tools, like Power BI, that could be used to help accomplish these goals. Following some additional consultation, Data-Mail was ready to implement their own process improvements.
blum worked with Data-Mail to modernize and systematize some of their manual and repetitive finance-related processes. Prior to learning about the benefits of Power BI, Data-Mail relied heavily on paper-based financials that had to be printed and distributed across all departments in the company. These paper-based financials have now been transformed into digital reports allowing for easier access to the information. Data-Mail now has a complete visual understanding of all of their data with the powerful dashboard and reporting features of Power BI.
Moving to Power BI has eliminated the need to work in numerous Excel spreadsheets. Under the previous solution, employees had to manually update a spreadsheet with invoices on a daily basis. With Power BI that data is automatically input into the system, transformed and manipulated using Power BI’s robust query editing capability and fed right into their dashboard reporting. The manual work of checking error-prone spreadsheets is now eliminated, saving the organization time and allowing them to focus on analyzing the results of their data.
Financial review meetings often used to end with a list of questions that require the finance team to dig into numbers further. By having dashboards on screen displaying relevant information in these meetings, questions about what data is driving financial results can be answered during the meeting. It then falls on the operational management to connect what the data is saying to what is happening on the shop floor at the time that the questions are asked. This helps business managers take meaningful actions out of the meetings, leading to more effective financial review meetings.