Background
Brightwell is a global business offering a wide range of customisable solutions that improve its clients’ cleaning experiences.
For many years it relied on a reporting platform, based on Crystal Reports, which was complex and time consuming to manage, especially to provide globally consolidated views. Brightwell required an agile, modern platform that would help streamline and improve its processes as well as provide an improved end-user, self-service experience.
Challenge
The client was grappling with an ageing reporting platform, far behind modern standards. It required several reports to achieve what a single Power BI report could do, creating a heavy workload for IT staff. This was exacerbated by each country operating its own fragmented reporting systems.
In total, Brightwell’s analysts were managing more than 1,000 reports with basic tools, including individual ones for each of the enterprise-wide sales team members.
In addition to the resource issues the legacy reporting platform caused, its limitations meant that it was difficult for Brightwell’s global sales team to access accurate, up-to-date reports.
“Our legacy reporting system was inefficient, and it was taking an unnecessary amount of time and resource to deliver reports for our global teams. Through Insight, we were able to transition to a modern system that could deliver in one report what our previous system needed 500 reports to do.
“Not only did Insight quickly build a modern, agile platform, its experts trained our IT team, ensuring that they were self-sufficient and could access the data they needed quicker than ever before.”
Ian Gilmour, Group IT Manager at Brightwell
Solution and Outcome
During this comprehensive project, Insight redesigned and modernised Brightwell’s global reporting infrastructure, moving it to a SQL Server backed agile Power BI platform.
Given that Brightwell’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system was within the Microsoft ecosystem, and it operated a small IT team, Insight advised that the Microsoft Power Platform and data solutions were the perfect fit for its requirements.
During the project, Insight designed and implemented Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes, built a mini data warehouse and created a global reporting data model.
At the same time, Insight enabled the client by building the system, facilitating future development, and providing crucial training for its transition to the Power BI platform. The result was a streamlined, efficient and intuitive platform that improved reporting and delivered self-service business intelligence.
Ultimately, the migration to the Power BI platform has enabled the Brightwell team to gain access to accurate, up-to-date data through standardised and interactive reports that cater to a wide range of business needs across all locations and employee levels.
Insight’s solution has also eliminated the need for Brightwell’s analysts to spend time creating and maintaining hundreds of reports, resulting in significant time and cost savings for the business and faster decision making processes.
Why Insight?
As a leading Solutions Integrator, Insight was able to quickly build a strong relationship with Brightwell by identifying an effective way to solve a long-standing problem within a short timeframe.
Thanks to its knowledge of the Microsoft Power Platform, Insight quickly developed a new global reporting system, by building reporting data models from the ground-up, that enabled Brightwell’s 500-plus users to enjoy self-sufficiency, with rapid access to accurate and up-to-date data.
Delivered within just six months, this new global, standardised reporting platform replaced fragmented, country-specific reporting systems, reducing maintenance costs and addressing the limitations of the legacy platform.
