Our client, a US-based software company specializing in developing robotic process automation (RPA) software, approached HCLTech about developing a solution for personalized, easily accessible and highly actionable financial insights.
The Challenge
Need for proprietary UI and functionality
Changes in the global business environment have driven an acceleration in traditional corporate time cycles, including the time necessary to get insights and make decisions based on them. For CFOs and other high-level financial decision-makers, this has made the process of loading and clicking through even modern dashboard-based visualization tools often slow and cumbersome.
A key challenge was making the displayed insights more actionable than what is traditionally possible in a dashboard-based report. Thus, an intuitive UI that enables and encourages drilling down into the data for actionable insights was necessitated.
The Objective
Generate financial insights for improved business decisions
To enable the fastest possible time to insight and promote faster and better business-critical decisions, the solution needed to feature excellent data access speeds for things like, for example, a view of travel expenses.
The Solution
Developing a customized application for enhanced UI/UX
The client wanted to minimize the latency between the live and displayed data, as well as enable extensive interactivity with the data shown in the application.
- The team achieved this by building a customized SwiftUI frontend and loading datasets specified by the client into a data structure optimized for the application using the Azure Data Factory cloud ETL service
- The Python backend connects to optimized tables and was prepared for interconnectivity with data science algorithms
- Instead of relying on scaled versions of existing reports for data and UI, our developers identified drill-down routes in the data that would enable getting from high-level KPIs to actionable data — for example, by getting from a KPI to a view of how buyers from a specific region contributed to that KPI and then to data that would enable contacting the relevant sales representative
- The application was designed to drive engagement through a visually appealing and highly interactive user interface designed to compete with leading KPI monitoring applications, as well as a customizable news function that alerts users to relevant changes in KPI behavior
The Outcome
Improved insight discovery and actionability
After less than two months of development, the client's CFO received the first working version of the application and immediately began using it for everyday work. Having met their usability and insight value expectations, the application continues to serve as a foundation for further joint development. Android and desktop versions of the application are currently being worked on to accommodate a broader range of users, and there are planned expansions to the data and feature set, including churn analysis and forecasting.
