BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Data management is one of the things we do best, at Align BI. Unlike most other data management companies, we also know a lot about business and business analytics, and often offer advice along with our data management services. Incorporating our knowledge of business and management into our data management services has helped us make a lasting positive impact on the way our clients manage their businesses and their data alike. By providing both data management and business consulting services, we have helped many of our clients increase sales, drive corporate strategy, and align the technology they use with their business goals. Here are some specific success stories of our clients.
DSCO is the world’s most powerful Inventory Networking Platform, making it easier to see, share, and sell inventory from any source. They work with huge amounts of data, and they were finding it difficult to manage it all. Initially, they asked us to assist them in 2 ways: 1) Make an executive dashboard 2) Build customer facing business analytics for their retailers.
One of the first things we did was to sit down face-to-face with their executive team to determine their most important Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Once we determined their most important KPIs, we built an executive dashboard that was centered around their most important goals. The dashboard was a representation of their data that was easily discernible and relevant to those goals. We also created sub-dashboards that contained detailed information.
You see, a good executive dashboard is not just about technology; it’s about using technology to help make informed decisions. What we did was find the best targets and methods of visualization for their processes to help them use data in the most efficient ways to help them focus on what mattered most.
We are also building out a customer facing business analytics infrastructure that will allow their customers to access pre-built dashboards. We’ve also found from past experience building customer facing analytics that while the pre-built dashboards can handle a majority of the needs, they also will need custom analytics that are specific to a given customer. So, we’ve also provided the ability to build their own customer reports and dashboards.
WebBank is an industrial bank that provides customized consumer and commercial financing solutions on a nationwide basis. Through a referral from another local bank they contacted us to get help managing a unique business model that requires Millions of financial calculations to determine what fees to collect from their partner lenders. Their current calculation in Excel reached its computing limits within a couple months already, not even the most powerful machine purchased specifically for it was able to finish calculations for that period.
By combining best practice data warehousing practices with complex financial functions taking time value of money into consideration, we built a custom Finance application that has been very important to the bank for over three years now. Even as loan volumes have grown more than fifty times in size, performance of the application still runs reliable and performant in well under an hour. It has been designed to easily handle various types of rate changes at any given point in time and includes an auditing framework that alerts the business of potential data quality issues at different severity levels. Output data is used has been the trusted source to compare against partner companies and true up revenue on a monthly basis.
Over the course of 10 years, we helped Adobe with a number of data management and business management tasks. One of the biggest projects we worked on with Adobe was creating a data warehouse that allowed them to optimize their marketing campaigns. To begin, we sat with them and helped them define the steps in their marketing funnel. Then, we pulled data from various different data sources such as Salesforce and pushed it into an OLAP cube and Tableau. The data warehouse we built stored large amounts of information in a way that was accessible, searchable, and easy to understand.
Using what we built, they were able to see which campaigns and marketing assets were most valuable and use that information to market more effectively. The marketing attribution algorithms we created made it easy for them to determine which types of marketing they should be focusing on so they could divide the campaign credit to different marketing areas. This made optimizing much easier, and allowed them to increase the effectiveness of their marketing considerably.
