Transformed Manual Reporting into Automated Intelligence
Delivering clarity and giving management back their time to lead
Challenge
A middle market private equity firm acquired a family-owned multi-unit home services franchisee that used an old industry-specific ERP to run the business. Management spent days each month manually extracting data from the ERP to build Excel-based reports that were distributed via email each Monday morning.
The Issues:
- Repetitive, monotonous, and time-consuming tasks to understand weekly location and technician performance
- Reports were stored in individual Excel files with no version control
- Manual extraction and reconciliation process to ensure reports tied to the system of record
- Adding new locations and a pending ERP implementation required management to rethink their reporting systems and processes
"We have been reporting this way for a while, but we know it's unsustainable." – CEO
Solution
The PE firm engaged Render Analytics to work with the CEO to deliver fully automated business intelligence to eliminate the manual tasks and save the management team significant time each week in reporting.
Created a data warehouse with a data pipeline from a new ERP (joined with historical data tables from the old ERP)
Delivered an automated BI platform to view daily technician and job performance at each location
Fostered a data-driven culture that improved communication between the executives and location managers
The Render Analytics Solution:
- One Source of Truth: Implemented a GCP data warehouse with consolidated data from the old and new ERP with well defined fields and a consistent data model
- Clear and Automated Dashboards: Delivered clear and automated KPI dashboards in Power BI that provided actionable insights so that Management could view metrics each day to drive operational improvements
Results & Benefits
Outstanding Operational Performance
Daily review of KPIs resulted in operational improvements that drove best-in-network financial performance.
Significant Time Savings
Automated dashboards saved the COO and other management team members days each month (eliminating several time-consuming manual tasks).
Automated Benchmarking
The Company could more easily compare location performance against regional benchmarks and across each location.
Improved Communication
The CEO now uses the dashboards to review performance with each location manager, which drove clarity around corporate value drivers and areas for improvement.
Exit Readiness
The Company now has a data-driven culture and a detailed history of KPIs that demonstrate operations improvements, which will help in any future sale process.
"I could not be more satisfied with the analytics dashboards that Render Analytics provided. We can quickly access critical data, which in turn has fundamentally changed how we operate. Our company has become much more agile with our decision making. The dashboards allow us to slice the data in so many ways, which led us to look at our business through a different lens. The working relationship was wonderful as well. The Render team was not only patient but clear and concise during the whole process. This is a 5-star team that delivers a 5-star business intelligence environment!" - C.A., President & CEO