next-gen AWS Analytics Platform at half the cost BI TRANSFORMATION CASE STUDY I give a huge amount of credit to Insight Consulting

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1 next-gen AWS Analytics Platform at half the cost CASE STUDY I give a huge amount of credit to Insight Consulting for their leadership in building a business intelligence foundation for our company. Director, Enterprise Data Management BI TRANSFORMATION Real business transformation opportunities are a rarity for most companies. Insight Consulting Group led a global renewable energy company to use Business Intelligence to optimize its cash position and rapidly transform to a cloudbased analytics platform on Amazon Web Ser vices at less than half the cost of a traditional data warehouse. The reporting solution streamlines managing and optimizing cash and conser vatively delivered $500K in analyst productivity gains and the company realized a reduction in average days past due by 27%. Beyond that, the company enjoys a next-generation, cloud-based analytics platform that enables data-driven, self-ser vice innovation using Tableau business analytics on AWS RedShift. Case Study - BI Transformation 1

2 THE CHALLENGE LEADING GLOBAL RENEWABLE ENERGY COMPANY EnergyCo Location USA Headquarters, 23 countries Markets Commercial, Utility, Residential, Public Sector Business Model Vertically-integrated, spanning manufacture of polysilicon to solar panel assembly to project development, construction and management Client Size $3B Sales 5-year Growth 90% CAGR Megawatts Installed Employees 3,300 people in 23 countries Business History Grown through dozens of acquisitions, most recently expanding from Solar into Wind power generation Business Outlook With renewables commanding a mere 1% of world-wide energy market share, EnergyCo is uniquely positioned to capture significant market share in the expanding renewable energy market Solar power systems require a substantial capital outlay and long time horizons to fund the equipment and infrastructure required to deploy. Throughout the business, a key to success is rapidly acquiring resources to service demand. As EnergyCo s growth skyrocketed, they soon found themselves in a challenging cash flow position. What once worked when they were small - Cash and A/P reporting done reactively in Excel by armies of analysts - was no longer sustainable. Individual reporting and analysis drove conflicts as their cash position worsened. EnergyCo lacked centralized, standardized, repeatable metrics and dashboards for Cash Management, A/P, and Spend Analytics that the Business could trust. The company s lack of investment in modern reporting capabilities, in the face of severe growth and integration requirements, had resulted in chaos, misinformation and drained productivity across the strained analytical community. Analysts were spending untold hours in meetings trying to reconcile cash needs, resolve conflicts and handle escalations. If the company did not improve this soon, they faced real consequences of losing vendors, impacting customers or being forced to slow their growth due to lack of cash visibility. The cash management problems alongside the company s rapid growth, corporate spin-off and continued acquisitions prompted executive management to champion a business and finance transformation. A key component of company transformation program was to modernize business intelligence, analytics, and reporting capabilities with the top business objective of improving Cash Management. THE JOURNEY EnergyCo engaged Insight Consulting Group to lead the BI Transformation program based on leadership s positive prior experience with the firm. EnergyCo smartly invested in dedicated business resources - a Director and employees - to partner with Insight on the BI Transformation, a move that was foundational to the program s success. The integrated team engaged a broad spectrum of business leaders to build a compelling story around the highest potential ROI opportunities for business analytics. In parallel, the team vetted technical delivery options for the BI- EDW platform through rapid prototypes. An agile approach to a Cash Management solution, addressing the #1 pain point for the Business, was successful in launching both the platform and BI program. As the Insight team developed the full integrated Cash Case Study - BI Transformation 2

3 Management solution, EnergyCo staffed a IT Director over a newly-formed BI-EDW organization that would support and scale the BI-EDW solution. Details of the solution can be found below. THE RESULTS With Insight Consulting s help, EnergyCo realized a cascading dashboard solution with drill-to-detail for Cash Management in six months that their business people love. A Center of Excellence program empowers self-service business data discovery, visualization and analytics on integrated Cash Management data updated daily. The solution streamlines managing and optimizing cash and conservatively delivered $500K in analyst productivity gains and a reduction in average days past due by 27%. Beyond that, EnergyCo now has a next-generation, cloud-bi analytics platform that enables continued data driven innovation through Tableau on AWS RedShift. Behind the scenes, the Insight Consulting team also deployed a robust ETL architecture, data standards, a business glossary and other best practices to solidify the EDW infrastructure. EnergyCo credits the Insight Consulting team for putting the BI foundation in place - from roadmap to BI platform installation to BI application deployment - a BI transformation they never could have built on their own or using traditional technology focused consulting firms. SOLUTION DETAILS FUNCTIONAL TRACK Through personal interviews and workshops with two dozen key stakeholders, the team rapidly executed Insight s BI Roadmap methodology which included: Capturing analytic priorities and requirements, guiding participants to ask the right questions Cataloging in-flight business intelligence initiatives Developing a project backlog with prioritized scoring against strategic objectives The outcome of this functional track included plans for phased delivery of 3 priority BI programs approved by the Steering Committee: (1) Cash Management, (2) Project Profitability and (3) a BI Center of Excellence. The team immediately began iterative development on the Cash Management project which entailed integrating data from the procure-to-pay modules from five separate ERP systems, HFM as well as aligning with a new Oracle E-Business Suite ERP implementation. Insight s strong business sense enabled the team to design solid business rules - business unit segmentation, intercompany A/P flagging and an enterprise Open A/P Snapshot roll-forward technique - that were essential for business adoption of the combined data sets. The team mapped business processes for key master data domains to improve the process and data quality. The project team also managed deftly through three transformation leader- We really appreciate all of your help in getting us up and running and the significant knowledge you have provided our company. It s been great working with the Insight team! Director, Finance Transformation Case Study - BI Transformation 3

4 ship changes and kept the BI program on track. TECHNICAL TRACK Running concurrently, the technical track of the roadmap took inventory of all key BI infrastructure, applications and software licenses. Leveraging Insight s technical acumen and market research, a short list of BI and Data Warehousing technologies, on which EnergyCo would prototype and standardize, was evaluated and scored by the Operating Steering Committee with the following selections: Data Warehouse: With no enterprise data warehouse in place, Amazon Web Services RedShift was chosen for it s low cost, highly scalable, cloud-based, columnar data warehouse. I can t thank you enough for your guidance and support on behalf of myself and EnergyCo. The amount of information and the range of new content that I have learned from you and your team is really incredible. Insight is top notch! BiCOE Lead Data Integration: Standardized on IBM InfoSphere, previously purchased best-in-class data management software that had not yet been implemented. BI Tool: Tableau Server and Desktop were chosen to empower a dynamic, silicon-valley business community with an easy-to-use self-service tool sporting the best data visualization and dashboard features. Insight Consulting and EnergyCo deployed a next-generation, cloud-based, scalable enterprise data warehouse, business intelligence & analytics platform with the following architectural components: Staging S3 Load IBM Data Integration AWS Redshift 8-Node EDW Tableau Analytics Analytics Platform Data Centers Company Network Users AWS EC2, RDS, S3 AWS Redshift Data Warehouse Tableau Server 9; Tableau Desktop 9 IBM InfoSphere Information Server, Enterprise Edition 11.3 Case Study - BI Transformation 4

5 This high performance architecture deployed using AWS infrastructure services cost less than half the amount of using a traditional data warehouse vendor or on-premise data center. INSIGHT SERVICES PROVIDED Services provided by Insight Consulting Group as a part of the BI Transformation project included: Business Intelligence Strategy & Roadmap Cloud-based BI & Analytics Technology Implementation Analytics Solution - Cash Management and Spend Analytics Enterprise Data Warehouse and Data Integration Data Visualization & Dashboards Self-Service Business Intelligence, Center of Excellence Insight Consulting Group is a boutique consulting firm specializing in business intelligence program management, strategy, analytics solutions, data visualization, data warehousing and self-service BI for Fortune 500 client accounts. Please contact us at: connect@insightconsultinggrp.com. Visit for more information. By Chuck Utterback, Principal Case Study - BI Transformation 5