MedImpact · Healthcare benefits · Three months

Cutting a $100k reporting bill during a hiring freeze

The situation

MedImpact was facing a $100,000 renewal on its DOMO and Report Builder subscriptions, in the middle of significant budget cuts that saw roughly 30 percent of staff laid off. Leadership reporting for more than 1,500 employees ran on those tools, so cancelling without a replacement was not an option. Whatever came next had to be built and adopted before the renewal date.

What our team did

We migrated the entire senior leadership reporting estate to Power BI inside three months. Rather than lift and shift, we rebuilt around self service so analysts and accountants could answer their own questions instead of queuing for a report.

Working alongside the data science team, we restructured the underlying Oracle SQL ETL process. We also consolidated three to five reports scattered across separate web pages and applications into a single application, removing the duplication that had staff running the same task in several places.

Version control was brought under governance to keep accuracy intact as the estate grew, and we ran open working sessions so the team could debug dashboards themselves.

The result

• The $100k annual subscription was retired, on schedule, during deep cost cutting
• ETL load times fell by 80 percent
• Staff could reach millions of transactional records in under two minutes
• Daily reporting consolidated from up to five destinations down to one

Tools: Power BI, Oracle SQL, DOMO, Report Builder

Harbor Rail Services · Rail · Three years

Building a BI function from nothing

The situation

Harbor Rail had no business intelligence capability. Reporting was manual, there was no central data platform, and billing data was being keyed into a web based system by hand. That manual entry was slow, expensive, and a persistent source of errors in a process that fed revenue directly.

What our team did

We established the company’s first BI division and deployed an in house SQL Server, giving the business a single place for its data to live.

With that foundation in place we automated data entry into the web based billing system. The work meant handling inconsistent inputs reliably enough to run unsupervised, tuning for accuracy rather than chasing full automation and accepting the errors that come with it.

The result

• A permanent BI function and central SQL Server, where previously there was neither
• Billing automation running within a 3 percent error margin
• $350,000 or more saved annually in labour costs

Tools: SQL Server, Power BI, automation scripting

Barrier Companies, now Remedi8 · Construction services · 16 months

The report that helped close an acquisition

The situation

Barrier Companies had no reporting repository. Questions from department heads, supervisors and field staff scattered across the business, and each one triggered a manual report. Data sat in SAP, Insightly, ADP and a sprawl of Excel files with nothing joining them. Leadership had limited visibility at exactly the moment the company was preparing to attract investors.

What our team did

We built the analytics function from scratch, consolidating SAP, Insightly, ADP and assorted Excel sources using Google Scripts and C++ automation, cleaning and correcting the data as we went.

For the Chief Strategy Officer we produced descriptive and predictive analysis, delivered as executive reporting for the VP of Strategy and Business Development. We built a live scorecard tracking sales headcount nationally, giving the C suite a view of human capital it had never had, and created a pipeline into Department of Homeland Security census data revealing market penetration by city, state and region across active hospitals, schools and prisons.

Finally we published a Power BI report telling the company’s financial story to investors.

The result

• The investor report contributed to the company’s acquisition, and the business trades today as Remedi8
• Headcount visibility for the C suite led to increased bonuses
• Routine work automated across departments, freeing up 20 percent of weekly hours
• Documentation written so the work could be maintained without us

Tools: Power BI, SAP, Insightly, ADP, Google Scripts, C++

A major California utility · Utilities · Ongoing since 2021

A wildfire mitigation programme brought back on schedule

The situation

The programme entered 2025 at risk. Work had to be distributed across multiple regions with no visibility into how to balance it, benchmark calculations were missing, and some data sources were simply unavailable. The programme reports to the state utilities regulator, so slipping deliverables carried regulatory as well as operational consequences.

What our team did

We led a team of analysts building the reporting tools to track the programme, evolving existing reports and creating new ones where nothing suitable existed.

We developed data models supporting what if analysis across programmes and government commitments, spanning both electric and gas operations on wildfire mitigation, network health and pole replacement. Working with data scientists, we modelled crew capability against real constraints: upcoming holidays, seasonal heat exhaustion, and emergency rerouting during storms and floods.

Alongside the programme work we took ownership of Power BI workspace capacity, established peer review and compliance checks across the department’s reports, and worked with UX on reusable templates.

The result

• Programme leads across multiple regions could realign effort, and all deliverables completed by end of Q3
• Reporting supported executive communications to the public during the California wildfire crisis
• Report creation timelines cut by 40 percent through templates and quality control
• Company wide dataflows reduced SQL calls and platform cost

Tools: Power BI, SAP HANA, Salesforce, SharePoint, Azure DevOps, JIRA

SoCalGas · Utilities · Data engineering

Nine months of work delivered in four

The situation

Operational Insights had a feature implementation scheduled to take nine months. Separately, Agile programme reporting was being compiled by hand from several sources, taking over a week to produce and arriving too late to change anything.

What our team did

We led the Business Solutions team, provided technical guidance across workspaces, datasets, connectors and gateways, and designed data warehousing on SQL and Amazon Redshift. We built SAP BODS workflows for migration, and an Agile metrics dashboard for DPPG drawing on Azure DevOps data with custom DAX measures.

The result

• The nine month implementation was delivered in half the time
• Agile reporting went from over a week of manual compilation to near real time daily updates
• A C level hyper wall gave executives visual command of operations

Tools: Power BI, SQL, Amazon Redshift, SAP BODS, Azure DevOps, DAX