Nonprofit Organization Adds Power BI To Its Processes To Improve Client Management

Overview

VNB Consulting assisted a nonprofit organization consolidate data from system such as RealPage, Awards, Azure SQL DB, SharePoint and Excel to build a reporting solution to improve client management.

Customer Profile

A widely recognized nonprofit social services organization whose goal is to create high-quality permanent and transitional housing for the homeless. Its philosophy holds that supportive housing costs substantially less than homeless shelters and many times less than jail cells or hospital rooms, and that people with psychiatric and other problems can better manage them once they are permanently housed and provided with services. The non-profit was considering a Power BI project management dashboard to better manage decision making for these problems.

Customer Situation

power bi project management dashboard solution vnb consulting

Customer was looking for a solution where they could reduce the overhead and mistakes caused due to siloed reporting done within various departments. Interview with business users and the subsequent analysis showed major inefficiencies in how the customer managed the data journey – entry, storage, process, retrieval, and distribution. Data was entered into Excel spreadsheets and then manually manipulated to create reports for consumption and decision making by various groups. Data sharing and distribution were problematic as data existed in multiple systems within different departments. Every time a report needs to be generated, multiple complex queries had to be written, with no guarantees that the data retrieved to generate the reports are not duplicated, missed, or inaccurate. Customer wanted to consolidate all the data into a central repository and build BI across different departments with one source of truth.

Our Solution Offering

powerapps

Our expert BI team kicked off the the project with multiple rounds of business users interviews to capture requirements and detailed review of the current siloed Bi landscape. The goal of this project was to design and build an enterprise grade data warehouse to build powerful reports and dashboards, which would entail: - Creating a data repository from disparate data sources (e.g. Case Management, Compliance, Events, Incidents, Leasing, Housing Development etc.) - Automating and managing the flow of data between systems so it’s consistent and fluid, and in compliance with future state vision - Cleansing of data that would remove inconsistencies, inefficiencies and duplication of data, and improve data quality, bring uniformity and ensure validity of data as it traverses through different systems - Treat and prevent incongruent data - create missing links between datasets like client and residents (and other datasets, wherever applicable) Our BI team proposed central repository of data built using Azure SQL Data Warehouse along with the Power BI project management dashboard solution for Visualizations. Data from various sources such as RealPage, Awards, on premises SQL Server, SharePoint and Excel were brought into the central repository using Azure Data Factory. A Data dictionary was created using Azure Data Catalog. Power BI was used to create reports and dashboards to help the customer to get better insights into its daily functions. Power Apps was also integrated into Power BI reports to capture additional details for the client entities and would reflect information automatically. This would provide complete 360-degree client data, and would give an overall perspective.

Customer Benefits

  • The new centralized BI solution allowed customer business users to gain deeper insights into clients life cycle resulting in overall improvement of client management.
  • The new automated solution enabled the IT to delivery key reports at a much fast pace to the upper managements and government agencies for audit purpose.
  • Having data in one common repository reduced the data discrepancies resulting in lower cost to maintain the reporting solution.

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