From Static Reports to Dynamic Insights: A Data-Driven Success Story

We take pride in helping our customers overcome their IT challenges and achieve remarkable success. Today, we are thrilled to share how a commercial real estate business, with Acora’s Data & AI expertise, transitioned from a static, report-dependent state to a dynamic, data-driven powerhouse capable of making strategic decisions that propel the business forward.

Overcoming visibility and integration hurdles

The company was dealing with a major problem: a lack of visibility into business insights across the organisation. Without valuable data at their fingertips and no ability to interrogate the data, the Executive Leadership team were stuck with static reports and thus unable to make informed, actionable, data-driven decisions. Despite their efforts to solve the problem internally, their technical teams struggled to integrate best-of-breed products like Snowflake into the wider IT system. After investing significantly for nine months, they had high consumption charges but no substantial return. The company’s technology-first approach hadn’t considered the vital aspects of integration and data engineering. In addition, data governance issues such as uncontrolled data access and the absence of audit mechanisms raised security concerns.

A tailored solution with Microsoft

Acora stepped in with an initial investment of £50,000 from the customer to create a data platform within the customer’s Microsoft ecosystem. The strategy began with a Databricks Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This MVP focused on a single data use case based on Salesforce, ingesting and outputting data through a visualisation layer in PowerBI. Set up within just six weeks, this solution provided drill-down reporting capability, delivering rapid results. It produced more granular insights and served as a proof point for the value of investing in a target architecture over merely acquiring a tool for report generation.

Expansion and impact

After successfully demonstrating the value with a single data use case, Acora was tasked with transitioning the Databricks MVP to production and ingesting all business data from various ERP, finance, and CRM systems over the last 6-8 months. This involved incorporating six Salesforce instances, Workday, Kantata, and more, as well as addressing 96 business KPIs. By utilising the customer’s Azure environment to implement the Databricks platform, Acora achieved time and cost savings and seamless integration for the customer, reducing data ingestion costs by £20,000 a month. This marked a significant milestone in their journey towards becoming a data-mature organisation. They now have the ability to conduct more advanced analytics, automate processes, and share knowledge and education.

The right expertise for data-driven success

The project highlighted the importance of having the right data engineering expertise. Acora’s involvement helped the customer identify the need for the correct profile of data experts to leverage their data for actionable insights fully. Acora’s strategic approach and tailored solutions have enabled the customer to address its immediate challenges and set the stage for ongoing success in the digital economy by empowering them to make their data and analytics achieve more.