Microsoft BI unlocks data

Craigs Investment Partners, one of New Zealand’s largest investment advisory and management firms, offers personalised investment solutions to private, corporate and institutional clients.

Information is the company’s lifeblood, but it was fast outgrowing existing systems and resources for managing and using that information. Data from disparate sources – such as proprietory databases of trading data, asset management and client information, as well as financial systems and information buried in excel spreadsheets – had to be handled using time consuming manual processes.

Craigs worked with Theta to develop and implement a business intelligence strategy and roadmap to centralise the data, ensure data integrity and automate manual data processes. The Microsoft BI suite, with its familiar interfaces and powerful reporting tools, enabled self-service access to business information.

Data was consolidated in a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data warehouse – the foundation for a flexible, scalable, robust BI platform that provides a single source of the truth.

The BI Semantic Model with Power View allows users to visualize and interrogate that data, and tight SharePoint integration makes collaboration and information sharing easy. Role level security via Active Directory manages access privileges, right down to transaction level. And a user-friendly dashboard brings the data to life, on desktops across the business, every day. Stuart Prendergast, Head of IT, Craigs Investment Partners:

Our advisers now have immediate self-service access to information about assets and holdings. No waiting for someone to run a report, no manual intervention needed. The BI dashboard provides a snapshot of business activity at a glance, and across the business we’re empowered to make better, more strategic, decisions.

Users can now see key business information, such as customer holdings and growth, at a glance. With intuitive and user-friendly Power View they can create their own charts and reports, and visualise the data to make it easy to understand. Users can also can drill down, slice and dice this data by multiple dimensions, and run ad hoc reports to answer particular queries or investigate issues.

Once the first phase of this roadmap was successfully delivered, additional reports were commissioned almost immediately. When advisers saw how easily they could access, report on and use information that was previously buried, they wanted more!

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Benefits

• Self-service access to business information
• Reduced manual reporting for efficiency and increased data confidence
• Consistent and accurate results to support real-time decision making

Technology

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2013
• SQL Server Integration Services
• Theta ETL Framework
• SQL Server Reporting Services
• Power View
• BI Semantic Model
• PerformancePoint Services