Delivering Rich Business Intelligence

The Old-School Way of Doing Business

The best way for you to appreciate the benefits we gained by using Flex is to get a feel for what we do as a business—how we used to view our data before we were using Flex, and what we had to go through in order to distribute that data across the organization.

We have a variety of offices in different cities and several hundred of our consultants work in the field. As with any growing services firm, we face the constant challenge of keeping on top of our numbers, knowing where our resources are, and deciding what steps we need to take from a managerial perspective to stay profitable while doing the best possible work for our clients. We track our numbers on a weekly basis, including billable rate, use of staff, profit margin, revenue, sales, and other key metrics that enable us to keep tabs on the health of our consulting organization. And every week, our operations manager would collect this data and put it into a scorecard that would enable our employees to visualize the data they need to do their jobs. Figure 1 illustrates our old-school way of doing business.

Figure 1. Old school business intelligence data gathering

Essentially what this data-gathering process used to entail is a lot of manual manipulation of data, re-keying data from one presentation format to another, and as-needed changes to data should values change between the initial data-gathering process and the process of distributing the data across the company to department heads and other decision makers. As our operations manager once told me after explaining the process to me in detail, "There has to be a better way of doing this."

This is when we had our first revelation of how to solve our business problem, a solution that we decided to call rich business intelligence.

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