A BI Solution to Control Financial Data Flows and Speed Up Reporting by 90%

Summary

INNERLUXES designed a business intelligence solution for a global customer-experience outsourcing company and built its financial-analytics and automated-invoicing modules. By consolidating data into a warehouse with OLAP cubes and self-service reporting, the solution is estimated to cut report-preparation time by up to 90% and gives senior management daily visibility into financial operations.

About the Client

The Client is a global customer-experience outsourcing company with more than 3,000 employees, specializing in customer experience management including outsourced call-center services. Its own clients are well-known companies across retail, IT, healthcare, insurance, and entertainment, and it runs operations in several countries.

With no transparent analytics and reporting processes in place, the Client needed a technology partner to design a business intelligence solution and implement it in iterations.

Business Intelligence Consulting

To get a 360-degree view of the as-is state of the Client's analytics and reporting, INNERLUXES's consultants held in-person interviews with key stakeholders (CEO, CIO, Director of Care Service Line, and others), ran brainstorming sessions and workshops, and analyzed the available documentation. The Client then received a solution concept for data-driven tactical and strategic decision-making, planning, and performance management — addressing error-prone manual data extraction, unconsolidated data, ad-hoc reporting, and insecure data sharing. Its key components were:

• A data warehouse for all aggregated data.
• Analytics services — MOLAP cubes and ML models for in-depth analysis.
• Reporting tools for business users to create reports, scorecards, and dashboards.
• An analytics web portal for business users to interact with the BI solution.
• A client web portal for the Client's customers to securely access analytics insights about their own customers.

The solution was designed to help the Client meet daily reporting needs; deliver timely, actionable insights at every level; run comprehensive performance assessments (corporate, department, employee); accurately forecast performance, growth, revenue opportunities, and loss risks; optimize workforce management and reduce customer churn; raise data security; and generate additional revenue by offering analytics services to its own clients. INNERLUXES also provided a detailed tech-stack recommendation that fit the Client's existing software licenses and let its in-house IT team maintain the solution without outside help.

Development of Financial Analytics and Invoicing Modules

The Client chose to start with modules for basic financial analytics and automated customer invoicing. INNERLUXES assigned a team of a business analyst, a solution architect, two database developers, a front-end developer, and two QA engineers, and first designed the solution architecture:

• Data source layer — internal and external sources (telephony software, CRM, financial software, the HR system, clients' labor-time tracking systems, and more).
• Data integration layer — to extract data from source systems (agent calls, schedules and rates, client data, paid invoices, payroll), stage it in raw form, and process it further.
• Data warehousing layer — to store cleansed, consolidated, structured data.
• Business intelligence layer — OLAP cubes for multidimensional processing and a web interface for creating, editing, saving, publishing, and viewing daily financial reports (estimated revenue, wages, revenue by program, gross margin by activity type, location, FTEs per program, and more), plus creating invoice templates and generating customer invoices.

Within ten months, the Client received fully functioning modules and supporting documents, including a software requirements specification, a UI kit, technical design, and a user manual.

Key Outcomes for the Client

• A full-scale BI solution with self-service capabilities, estimated to save up to 90% of analysts' report-preparation time and to enable data-driven decision-making, planning, and performance management.
• An invoicing module that fully automates customer invoicing.
• Daily reporting for senior management on estimated revenue, employee wages, gross margin, and more, for greater visibility into financial operations.
• Streamlined evolution of the BI solution thanks to its flexible architecture.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Analysis Services, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services.