Note:

HCLTech engaged with Key2Act, which is now WennSoft. Just last week, WennSoft was purchased by Volaris Group, a billion dollar buy-and-hold acquirer of software businesses. “We view this acquisition as a great opportunity for both Volaris and WennSoft to provide solutions for the ever-evolving Microsoft ecosystem around Great Plains and Business Central,” said Joe Westhuizen, Group Leader at Volaris.

Our engagement: Wisconsin-based Key2Act builds pre-packaged software for Business Intelligence and Field Service solutions for Construction Management markets. For an organization that delivers the value of data and technology to their client and market segment through their products and services, the idea of becoming a data-driven organization themselves was daunting. They were forging a path to establishing their own data as a product. Their ask was to establish the value of the data they owned as a valued asset and product to their business stakeholders with the following premise:

• Their organization’s data, as a high value product, is discoverable, trustworthy, secure and scaling over time.
• The domain of all data they own is viewed from the lens of business context.
• Every small win from the strategic decisions made from the business intelligence garnered from their data affects the organization’s growth.

Problem Statement:

To showcase the value of data as the most strategic product within the organization, the data science team proposed to develop a few key leadership dashboards for executive management. They defined metrics that showed various areas of organizational growth year to year, month over month and quarter over quarter which were to be showcased as high level visuals for their leadership consumption. Key2Act’s application infrastructure was predominantly in the D365 suite. Their decision to go with Power BI happened naturally due to the availability of its Pro license as part of Microsoft’s E5 license, its connectivity to their Dynamics infrastructure and its expanded high level visuals with drill down capabilities.

To that end, Key2Act team approached HCLTech with business operations and related KPIs. We translated this information into targeted visuals and aggregates that culminated in a compelling data story of Key2Act’s business. Once the project was broken down into deliverable tasks, the dashboards were delivered in an Agile model with a final hand-off ending in education to civilian developers at Key2Act who will continue following through on their data journey.

Project Objective and Delivery:

Here are a few success metrics the Key2Act team wanted to target as an outcome of this project, which became the biggest drivers of the design and development of the Leadership dashboards:

• The Executive Dashboard should display key performance indicators (KPIs) data in one location so corporate officers can make agile, data-driven decisions that drive employee productivity, revenue growth, and reduce risk.
• The Executive Dashboard should allow their organization's leaders to effectively measure marketing ROI, drive proactive changes and respond to market conditions as they happen.
• The dashboards should combine data from all business groups and allow users to freely explore data and dig deeper for insights.
• The Leadership Dashboard delivers actionable insights and on-demand learning, personalized for business leaders and their teams.

Impact/KPIs:

The Employee Onboarding Power App fully automates a process that once took 2+ hours per candidate. Employee forecasting needs and demands now result from the 360 view of employee training status based on job function; Increased training compliance in a highly regulated industry by streamlining the visualization, assignment and un-assignment of employees; Improved user adoption by creating a simple, responsive, and friendly user interface that can scale Novo's high data volumes; Migration of enterprise apps to cloud-based Microsoft solutions minimized the costs associated with managing on-prem apps.

With the source data coming from Dynamics 365 suite of applications, HCLTech’s team collaborated with SMEs from operations, IT and data science at Key2Act to deliver the following Executive Management (leadership) dashboards:

Sales and Opportunity Pipeline Management (with projected revenue)

• Pipeline by product line
• Pipeline by reselling organization
• Pipeline by Salesperson
• Pipeline from Direct vs Partner vs referral channels

Product Line Management (statistics delivered for various timelines including YoY, MoM, QoQ)

• Product performance month over month across the last 5 years
• Product performance by sales won versus lost
• Product performance by churn

Opportunity Analysis

• Average sales cycle by market segmented by industry verticals
• Product Line sales cycle metrics by various market segments

Lead Analysis Dashboard

• Lead by channel including their multi-channel marketing presence
• Lead analysis by Product Line
• Lead data further analyzed as points of contact and organizations by various market segments

American Homes 4 Rent (AH4R) is a leading single-family property owner, leasing operator and build-to-rent developer. They are an internally managed real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on acquiring, developing, renovating, leasing and managing homes as rental properties.

Since its inception nearly a decade ago, AH4R has partnered with HCLTech on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Today, we continue to provide the company with Application Support Management (ASM) for Dynamics 365, which is used across all its departments.

The company, like most present-day businesses, has had an increasing number of data sources and operational systems that carry client and prospect data. They have also had a need to track website traffic to understand their market behavior and interests. Using aggregates of their first party customer data (data that the business collects first hand) and the 3rd party data that is available to them through their online presence and other channels, they sought to segment their market and analyze their market’s sentiments and behavior.

The AH4R team’s goal was to improve customer engagement through personalization, therefore scaling up conversions rates, cross sale wins and recurring business wins and using geolocation (and other market relevant segmentation) to push discounts, content messaging, personalize offerings and attract customers away from the competition.

Problem Statement

• Provide AH4R with a system that unifies their customer data from the various systems in their technology landscape that carry information pertaining to each customer.
• Leverage the industry KPIs and predictive analytics templatized in Customer Insights to help them segment their market and develop analytics without involved data science development – offer them a low code/no code option to derive strategic measures and predictive intelligence.
• Showcase the strength of a CDP as a system that centralizes customer data from all sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service, and other customer experience initiatives
• Roadmap future growth of the CDP within the organization to scale to include data from their multi-channel presence

Project Objective and Delivery

The HCLTech team was tasked with leading the initiative by taking the Crawl, Walk, Run framework, and showcase the benefits of the platform in as little as 6-8 weeks with the first use cases. We approached the design and development with the fundamental premise that beyond using data to simply understand business patterns, which some products outside of a CDP have helped to do, the data needs to be actionable and make a compelling business story.

Here are a few success metrics associated with the project:

• Zeroing in on the following use cases as business wins:
  • Single source of truth of customer’s digital profile executive view
  • Utilize customer behaviour and preference patterns for cross channel outreach through customer segmentation
  • Select best prospects (from ingesting leads)
• Use the customer behaviour data to build predictive models:
  • Repurchase prediction
  • Further business value of customers prediction
  • Churn prediction
• Usage of customer journey and sentiment analysis for personalization
  • Drive digital marketing initiatives and personalize offerings sent to customer base based on a combined outcome through segmentation, prediction models and data extract to other systems
• Outline a growth roadmap to AMH team to scale up the value proposition of owning a Customer Data Platform

HCLTech Infrastructure Services Division (HCL-ISD) is a global IT infrastructure management services company that addresses the growing demand for the cost-effective management of technology infrastructure across geographically dispersed locations.

This project is very special to us because it is unique in the project scope – where we helped build BI for web site visit, multi-channel presence analysis, 3rd-party traffic monitoring and analysis of the effectiveness of the business group’s online presence. Not a lot of companies know to bank on both 1st-party data (data they collect themselves in their systems) and 3rd-party data (data that is available outside of their org – especially with their multi-channel presence these days).

Headline:

In a first of its kind disruption to HCL-ISD’s Marketing operation’s reporting methods, which were completely delivered using manually processed Excel worksheets since the business group’s inception, the team decided to upgrade to Power BI visualizations to deliver actionable business insights while automating aggregates and measures.

Problem Statement:

HCL-ISD uses PathFactory services for their content and digital marketing and Google Analytics to monitor their website traffic. While Power BI has an out-of-the-box connector to Google Analytics platform and derives near-real-time data analysis, PathFactory data needed a custom integration to be built.

Project Objective:

We worked with the HCL-ISD team to evaluate the various options of data retrieval to design the most effective data retrieval methods given the resources available and followed through with analytics design and delivery. Here are the highlights of the business intelligence derived from HCL-ISD’s Marketing data platforms:

PathFactory’s Content Management data analysis

• Top Viewed Pages
• Top Engaged Content Tracks by Session Time
• Top Engaged Accounts by Session Time

Google Analytics data analysis for website traffic

• Product Page Traffic
• Channel Analytics by varied traffic source
• Bounce rate and engagement analysis (% user increase over a period of time)

Lead Analysis Dashboard

• Lead by channel including their multi-channel marketing presence
• Lead analysis by Product Line
• Lead conversion rate
• Lead data further analysed as points of contact and organizations by various market segments

Opportunity Analysis

• Opportunity by product group
• Opportunity projections by product group for performance analysis: timeline comparisons (YoY, MoM, QoQ)
• Opportunity by the sales funnel pipeline stages
• Opportunity by varied sources and channels
• Opportunity growth by timeline (YoY, MoM, QoQ) with estimated revenue totals

Disney’s Parks, Experiences and Products business group’s costume inventory management operations run heavy due to the expanded line of characters, costumes, staff and the customer base they work with. The ask within the scope of the project was to offer visuals that helped business users build efficiency in the operation using data and analytics. To that end, Disney had identified 50 critical reports ranging in complexity from low to advanced for building in Microsoft Power BI.

Project Objective and Delivery:

We started the project in collaboration with Disney’s internal Data team. Once the domain data was curated within a centralizing data store – Maria DB on Amazon Cloud, our team reviewed the as-is data models and query joins to deliver actionable KPIs with reduced processing time.

Here is a high level summary of business operation KPIs that were delivered over the project time:

Costume inventory Management

• Stock report summary dashboard
• Low on Stock report
• Out of stock report and next best action analysis
• Costume in repair analysis

Asset by Location Analysis

• Costume Assets by distribution location
• Costume Assets by usage location
• Stock report summary by location dashboard

Costume by Employee transaction analysis

• Active Cast Members with Assets
• Employee/Personnel details
• Costume transacted out to employee, cast members and location summary dashboard
• Costume transacted out by Status and Issued To report
• Near real time Transaction updates by timelines and locations
• Costuming Rehire Recommendations based on historic data inputs

Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISOis an Independent System Operator (ISO) and Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) providing open-access transmission service and monitoring the high-voltage transmission systems throughout the US and Canada. MISO also operates one of the world's largest real-time energy markets.

MTEP (within MISO) includes recommendations for transmission infrastructure additions and electric grid improvements throughout the MISO footprint. It is a long-term annual planning study that identifies and supports the development of transmission infrastructure that is sufficiently robust to meet local and regional reliability standards and enables competition among wholesale energy suppliers. The operational KPIs for this line of operations include geolocation and related cost analyses.

Project Objective and Delivery:

The HCLTech team started the project in collaboration with MISO’s internal Data team. A unique nature of the project was the inclusion of Bing maps to show the geo location visually along with the KPIs to feature the data story. Here is a high level summary of business operation KPIs that were delivered over the project time:

Project Map overview

• Bing map of project distribution by location
• Project distribution visual filtered by project owner, transmission owner and planning region
• Project distribution visual filtered by project type and status
• Project distribution visual filtered by max kilovolts of energy
• Further drill through analysis

Approved annual planning study projects historic and current cost analysis

• Year over Year analysis of MTEP projects cost analysis
• MTEP projects by current cost allocation
• Projection of future growth of projects
• Proposed projects for future growth and related investment needs

Project Lifecycle Management of various MTEP projects

• Cost budget analysis of Projects (historic, current and future)
• Project status across its lifecycle
• Detailed drill throughs for further analysis for executive level Project Analysis

Cambridge Associates is a privately held investment firm based in the United States. It provides investment portfolio management and advisory services to institutional investors, including foundations and endowments, pensions, private clients, and corporate and government entities.

They selected HCLTech to profile their Customer Master data using the data profiling feature in Power BI and deliver data distribution as visualizations and drill-throughs to plan for a holistic data strategy and architecture rework of their Customer Master data assets.

Problem Statement: At present, Cambridge is using a legacy ERP system that serves as a central repository of customer data and records. The processes and systems carrying the Customer Master data have limitations and challenges related to data architecture, data security issues that give rise to security and compliance risks and inconsistent data maintenance and upkeep, and business process data definition inconsistencies.

Project Objective: The goal of the project was twofold: first, profile the Customer Master Data for quality issues and inconsistencies using Power BI, and second, deliver visualization dashboards with drill-through functionalities. These dashboards empower the CIO’s team and Operational leads to roadmap a plan to extract quality customer data for the next stage of their project, which was evaluation of the best technology platform to be the single source of truth for the customer master to replace the old system.

The final deliverables of the project included:

• Summary findings and presentation of the data quality concern using the Power BI Data Profiling visualizations
• Documented best practice recommendations for data quality improvements, including:
  • Improved data model for in-system design and integration design
  • System security and compliance controls education
  • Account management and end user security protocols
  • DevOps for data and development best practice
• DevOps for Data stewardship and data ownership RACI matrix introduction

A big takeaway from the above project stream was that Cambridge should establish time and budget on data governance as an ongoing organizational need, since time and cost of recovery or lost opportunity from not utilizing technology and data to their fullest value is a lot more expensive in the age of information. Given the recommendations and reports we have provided as part of this project, Cambridge is on a path towards the next stages of data maturity, which should lead them to the following outcomes:

• Real-time metrics to better monitor organizational performance and identify marketing needs
• Bridge the gap between obtaining the data analysis for a business problem and using the data analysis to drive decision making with respect to penetrating new markets while improving engagements with existing customers
• Use their first-party customer data in a strategic blend with third-party data available from their external market presence to scale the top-line growth of the business

Consumers Energy is a utility company that provides natural gas and electricity to 6.7 million of Michigan's 10 million residents, serving customers in all 68 of the state's Lower Peninsula counties.

Landing and Expanding:

• Started with a free Power App solution – we grew this Time Entry App to 10,000 users across the organization.
• Building and providing services and support across Dynamics 365 CE (300+ users).
  • Sales, Customer Service, Omnichannel, Marketing, Field Service and Portals.
• Transitioned 3,500 Tableau OnPrem Reports to Power BI, expanding the Azure consumption.

Business Problem:

• Over 10,000 reports in Tableau Analytics and Excel report formats owned and overseen across the organization’s multiple business groups.
• Analytics driven business operations.
• Extensive IT policies and procedures to maintain data for regulated and unregulated aspects of the business
• Content creator across the organization with Power BI Pro license and access

Solution: HCLTech’s Microsoft Business Applications team worked across the organization to:

• Optimize and identify business priority reports
• Classify the development feasibility of reports from complex to medium complexity to simple
• Two SME teams from HCLTech helped establish Power BI analytics framework and governance for self service
  • SME Team 1 helped develop 1,000+ high- and medium-complexity and business priority reports
  • SME Team 2 helped establish Power BI CoE over a project period of 6 months, driving adoption and education around policy, governance and development best practices

HCLTech carried out a series of workshops to analyze and design an approach to Power Platform governance, establishing an App Maker Community and Power Platform application development & support operating model.

The workshops begin with introducing foundational concepts:

• Environments
• Office and Power Platforms Roles & Responsibilities
• Power Platform Security
• Data Loss Prevention Policies
• Licences and Limits
• App and Flow Assessment
• Power Platform Best Practice Checker

The workshops then continue by defining the key business and operational processes that the client needs in order to manage, sustain and adopt Power Platform.

These sessions include:

• Managing Power Platform
• Maker Onboarding
• Compliance and App Onboarding
  • Joiners, Movers and Leavers
• Establishing your Maker Community
• App and Flow Assessment
• Stakeholder Engagement

These in-depth working sessions provided the necessary guidance to then implement a working Power Platform Center of Excellence as well as ongoing Power Platform best practices and support across multiple departments. HCLTech continues to present in ongoing roadshows, Power Platform training and guidance on strategic Power Platform projects.

We set up CoEs for the following clients:

• Agilent Technologies
• IKEA
• H&M
• bp
• Keysight Technologies
• P&G
• Land O Lakes
• Equinor
• AstraZeneca
• ABInBev
• Anglo American
• APTIV
• Cadent
• GN
• GSK
• Legal & General
• Leo
• Mondelez
• Volvo
• Nordea
• Nordea
• Thomson Reuters

Self-service Analytics Development and Governance CoE Starter Pack

Data culture is not a tool. It’s a change in mindset and behavior of the people in the organization and requires an approach that focuses on managing this change. A general way to look at the value of information is to consider:

• The replacement value of the information
• The cost to create the information
• Opportunity cost
• Regulatory failure costs

Data governance process

HCLTech’s data governance process includes:

• Assessment
  • Assessment of the as-is state of technology landscape – data sources that are tapped into to drive the visualizations
  • Data owners and stakeholders: matrix setup – and the business groups/stakeholders interacting with the data (creating, updating and consuming the data)
  • Business glossary review and updates
• Improvement
  • Data quality education
  • System security and compliance controls education
  • Policy groups identification
  • Application environment governance
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Account management and end user security protocols
  • DevOps for data and development best practices
  • Knowledge and agility
  • Structure and accountability definition
  • Change management and adoption drive establishment
• Sustainment
  • Governed Data
  • Governed processes
  • Business groups empowered with democratized data and analytics

  Final outputs:

  • Summary findings and presentation
  • Documented best practice recommendations
  • Steward and RACI Matrix
  • Established adoption plan within the identified business groups and IT team members for continued effort
  Targeted end results

  Data stewards: Identification, education and adoption

  • Data stewardship is a key part of data governance. This is a team of business stakeholders/leaders/data owners who oversee the data assets of a master data.
  • Identification of data stewards helps improve accessibility of data. They help maintain quality, consistency and security of the data assets for the specific master data in discussion due to their stake in the data. They help monitor the metadata.
  • Regardless of the technology solution being adopted, the success of the rollout depends on the ongoing maintenance of the data within the system. If data stewardship and accountability is unassigned, organizations will observe the data quality deteriorate over time. Data security breaches and poor data analytics are results of data quality deterioration.

  RACI Matrix with key markers identified for data democratization

  • Who sets success metrics and monitors how well the governance program is working?
  • Who are the data owners?
  • Who defines and maintains a business glossary?
  • Who creates and maintains policies on access security?
  • Who is protecting PII data privacy for compliance with GDPR and CCPA?
  • Who is looking after the quality of product data across all brochures and partner websites?
  • Who ensures data is consistent across all systems?
  • Who is policing external subscription data usage vs. license?
  • Who is policing privileged users like DBAs?
  Security and compliance

  In this section, we describe our security and compliance governance body oversight review.

  • Data as a high-asset-value product needs to be discoverable, addressable, trustworthy, self-describing, governed by industry standards and secure.
  • Establishing a process to ensure data ownership is overseen by a central governance body against basic policies is essential alongside a few classification schemes identified below for reference.
  • Data confidentiality classification scheme
  • Data retention classification scheme

  HCLTech leverages Power BI’s self-service model to organizational advantage. Power BI service is designed for collaboration and distribution. Democratizing data content allows business users to be a part of an ecosystem that will own responsibility for stewardship and maintaining the corpus of knowledge for the master data and related data assets.

  The CoE Starter Pack ensures:

  • Data-driven culture is embedded in every individual and business group of the organization.
  • Every user with content creation capabilities understands the details of data security and compliance of the organization.
  • Knowledge transfer and education becomes an ongoing effort within the business groups as newer employees/content creators are onboarded.
  • Business data stewards and content creators uphold IT’s data retention, infosec and data protection policies while developing drill-through content within the reports and dashboards to make strategic business decisions day to day.
  • Establishment of data product thinking within the organization. Data as a product is of high value in businesses today. Data domain-driven organizational structure to accelerate the momentum of generating information real-time from data assets and driving business decisions has become essential.

  The advantages of owning a modern data and analytics strategy include:

  • Real-time metrics that analyze top-line performance management processes to better monitor organizational performance and identify marketing needs
  • Reengineered business processes for a more efficient and evidence-based workforce and work environment
  • Significant return on investment and other benefits can come from several areas:
    • IT cost savings
    • Data aggregation and improvement of overall data quality
    • Precise data analytics and better business performance insights
    • Productivity improvements
    • Reduced regulatory and operational risk
    • The delivery of wholly new capabilities, services and even entire businesses by becoming an analytics-driven organization

  Content courtesy: Gartner and McKinsey Digital