Modernizing BI and Reporting at PHC Group
EnergySolutions’ leverages Incorta to unravel Oracle’s complexity for their reporting woes, enabling their team to quickly make data-driven decisions and save time and money.
11 million rows of data from SAP
80 million rows of data from Netsuite
70+ million row of data from finance system
THE CHALLENGE
Siloed data access
PHC Group, a conglomerate of companies, sought to unify their disparate data sources for better insights. Without visibility into booking, billing, and backlog data spread across various ERP and CRM systems like SAP and Netsuite, they faced challenges. Legacy systems lacked agility, leaving gaps in answering critical questions. Manual data extraction into Excel led to inefficiencies, eroding confidence in data accuracy. The reliance on single-use technologies increased costs and complexity, especially post-SAP migration, requiring additional IT learning and consultant support. Streamlining data access became imperative to reduce expenses and enhance operational efficiency.
THE SOLUTION
Rapid growth, time savings, and streamlined analytics
PHC Group, with many skilled engineers and architects, had developed individual data marts over a decade. However, these marts, like Epredia’s Azure-based one, faced issues due to Azure’s core technology and SQL server reliance for ETL, leading to outdated BI. Recognizing the inefficiency of disparate marts, especially for Epredia accessing SAP data, the IT team explored solutions like Snowflake, Azure products, and Incorta. Despite bandwidth limitations, Incorta stood out for its user-friendly interface, requiring minimal technical support.
Choosing Incorta, an operational lakehouse, bridged the gap between business users’ self-service needs and IT’s demand for reliable data. This decision empowered both teams to achieve more with fewer resources. Standardized scripts reduced reliance on support staff and consultants, while empowering business users to modify tables independently, boosting productivity through easy, self-service data access.
“Incorta stood out as an easy to implement, easy to use analytics engine. The breadth of connections to complex ERPs such as SAP, legacy systems and front-end applications, enabled PHC Group to modernize their BI and reporting while maintaining the prior years of work and data.” Zach Juneau, stated simply, “Incorta allows us to do more with less. Less technical expertise to implement, build and maintain, less cost to maintain, less time to implement, train and adopt. Incorta offered us the simplicity and agility to modernize our infrastructure and democratize critical data to all users.”
The strategy
Incorta simplifies corporate reporting and analytics for PHC Group, replacing Excel, PowerBI, and outdated applications. Data extraction, previously cumbersome, is now streamlined. Incorta acts as both storage and analytics engine, reducing the need for manual building and accelerating data access.
Through logical field renaming during data ingestion, Incorta ensures consistency and ease of use. Integration with existing SQL servers allows seamless migration of data and workflows, maintaining performance and preserving historical data.
The recent integration of the Incorta Excel plug-in empowers sales reps to access customer information and purchase orders effortlessly. They can utilize Excel’s familiar interface or directly query data in Incorta, enabling self-service analysis without technical expertise.
This level of self-service reporting, not achievable with Tableau or PowerBI, liberates IT teams to focus on technical innovation, empowering business development and product teams.
The Returns
Unlike the conventional ERP systems that often necessitate altering business processes to align with the technology, Incorta molded itself to the company’s existing processes. This malleability proved invaluable, as it allowed EnergySolutions to retain its operational integrity while harnessing the capabilities of the platform.
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Modernizing BI and Reporting at PHC Group
