An energy processing and transportation company empowers business users with flexible, self-service business intelligence

Client Background

The energy company is one of the largest natural gas gathering, natural gas liquids (NGL) and gas transportation and processing companies in the United States.

Industry Landscape

The US energy gathering, processing, storage and transportation industry is highly competitive and is characterized by transactional activity and operational data that offer opportunity for business analysis and idea “mining.” Companies rely on data-driven insight into operational and financial activity to help them identify trends, understand opportunities and improve performance. Business intelligence is a key lever for enabling these objectives.

The Opportunity

The company found that their traditional reporting platform supplied only a portion of the required flexibility. Employees were routinely performing detailed analyses by copying data from the standard reporting platform into other productivity tools such as spreadsheets, to conduct ad-hoc analyses. Leadership recognized that business insight could be accelerated by empowering end-users through self-service business intelligence, enabling both reporting and detailed analyses.

Solution

This solution reinforces key concepts such as data-as-a-service and self-serve business intelligence, while leveraging everyday productivity tools for usability. The scope included migration of reports to a Microsoft® business intelligence platorm without changes to existing report functionality. In addition, it enables the ability to leverage Microsoft PowerView to create and interact with reports based on tabular models and/or Microsoft PowerPivot workbooks. The Microsoft Report Designer allows users to create operational reports, shared data sources, shared datasets and report viewer controls used across a variety of data sources.

In addition to front-end analytic tools, the solution includes SharePoint services and business intelligent platform components that include SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services and the SQL Server DBMS.

Business Impact

• Enhanced user experience through streamlined access to accurate data
• Improved productivity of end users, enabling self-service analysis at point-of-need
• Standardization across enterprise data sources and analysis tools.
• Accelerated decisions based on data-driven insight
• Reduced operating costs