The Problem
This health services provider has had several vendors come in over time to produce needs reporting, which produced a variety of different platforms to handle the development and hosting of analytical and other types of BI Reports. This became cluttered for the end user to source the required reports, as well as the skills to develop against the different platforms in-house. In addition, a more holistic project to bring in similar health service providers together, to have a uniform BI environment is being developed.
This provider wanted a simplified, mainstream, operational PoV project implemented so they could learn from it in preparation for the larger, more encompassing BI Platform, which would have reports ready to be deployed immediately and skills in-house to develop for it.
The Solution
Much of the infrastructure to produce the PoV already existed within the provider’s extensive network. Reaching out to the resources needed for approval and access to the infrastructure required, as well as ensuring licensing was catered for, was the lion’s share of effort on this project. Once access was provided, an ETL process was created, accessing data from a source system, landing the data in a newly created database, and writing TSQL to transform the data whilst automated amongst SSIS packages.
Two Power BI Reports were built based on different areas of the health provider, using the transformed data to populate the Power BI reports. The Power BI reports were then hosted within a newly created instance of the Power BI Report Server, which is refreshed nightly. All the source code and infrastructure configuration was handed over to a newly recruited person within the client’s team, who will sharpen their skills in this area in preparation for the non-PoV solution; all were solved within 5 weeks.
Business Benefit
Having a fully operational non-production PoV solution has immediate but also many peripheral benefits. From having a report refreshed daily, through to being able to study the design of the data platform and SSIS packages, as well as the layout of the Power BI reports, puts the health services provider in a great position to prepare themselves for the holistic, more encompassing version in the coming months. The client has full access to a best practice but streamlined, on-premises end-to-end BI Solution, which is 100% operational to learn from.
There is also the benefit of knowing the right personnel who have helped set up the infrastructure, ensuring relationships with those key personnel continue to flourish.
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