This leading provider of integrated services focuses on transport, utilities, facilities and asset urban services. With over 40,000 employees across more than 300 sites in Australia and New Zealand, customers are at the heart of everything it does to design, build and sustain assets, infrastructure and facilities.
Business challenge
As a large integrated services provider, the company’s multiple lines of business in Australia and New Zealand were maintaining and analysing several silos of data independently. Small groups of users accessed the resulting data stores with several disparate reporting tools, and the existing data structures did not reflect business reality.
While some business requirements could be addressed, gaining a collective view of company-wide corporate performance was challenging. Matching data across systems was difficult, processes were highly manual, and maintaining multiple aging legacy applications was becoming more complex and costly. In addition, the environment did not meet required security policies for data storage and access, and the company was unable to use any new data being captured to gain insights into potential future product or service opportunities.
Both the business, and data and analytics teams needed better access to data. The integrated service provider wanted to use data more strategically to support and inform better business decisions. That required a single place for trusted data access with support to allow the organisation to consolidate legacy systems across multiple geographies. It sought to raise the maturity of data and analytics within the organisation, moving from the current approach where data was not used to drive decisions, to a strategic approach where data is used proactively to set direction and measure performance.
The goal was to establish a modern Microsoft Azure cloud and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) platform with data combined from multiple systems into a common repository, and self-service analytics capability for users to conduct their own exploration.
Any new solution also needed to provide a foundation to scale up capacity in the future. This project was critical to business success and the basis for expanding the EDW footprint across Australia and New Zealand.
Solution
As a long-standing partner of the organisation, DXC Technology was approached to build a modern data warehouse and analytics platform and establish the infrastructure required to provide effective and trusted reporting capabilities. DXC used a consultative design thinking approach and conducted a series of workshops with the company’s Data and Analytics team and business stakeholders to understand the requirements in more detail. Following two days of discovery workshops to uncover pain points and determine desired outcomes, DXC collaborated with the company’s architecture team over four weeks to define technical design, common architecture, security standards and policies.
The organisation’s approach was to go live with one use case initially. Human Resources was selected to demonstrate proof of value and show the difference it could make to the business. During the design phase, DXC worked with the integrated services provider to plan the business changes required to take full advantage of the latest capabilities. This included new governance structures and business processes based on the technology.
DXC deployed the cloud Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform in just six weeks. To achieve this accelerated delivery, DXC used its expertise and experience across all areas of the database build, data migration, analytics and reporting, and security to deliver a modern cloud-based solution. In addition, DXC’s solution accelerators (ie deployment via automation scripts, architecture blueprints, and reference architecture) were leveraged to deliver both time and cost savings for the project, considerably decreasing the timeline for the Microsoft cloud delivery.
“The team worked in partnership with us and always provided the right advice and support to guide us through the process and ensure success. ”
— data and analytics general manager, integrated services provider
Results and benefits
The integrated services provider now has a modern cloud-based data warehouse, analytics and reporting solution built on native Microsoft Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). Power BI provides interactive visualisations and business intelligence capabilities with a simple interface for end-users to create reports and dashboards. The solution allows for unlimited scalability of data at speed while maintaining cost optimisation. In addition, the platform is open and extendable while meeting all of the organisation’s stringent security requirements.
An enterprise reporting strategy and roadmap are also being developed, so the company has a standardised architecture and set of reporting tools to easily measure return on investment (ROI) for future initiatives. As the integrated services provider moves towards the strategic use of data, there will be greater interplay between the IT and business teams, with increasing self-service for users through PowerBI and other tools.
The company now has a single trusted data source with the ability to move from reactive to proactive data analysis, reporting, and visualisation for business insights at speed. The solution includes a corporate dashboard, KPI measurements across the business, and the ability to analyse and mine data to find insights, patterns, and trends; predict outcomes to improve forecasting; and analyse historical data for more informed business decisions.
The data and analytics general manager for the integrated services provider said, “The business is reporting value in the data and insights being delivered. I have been able to provide business insights at speed for a much lower cost - with the solution able to easily scale right across the business and expand as we identify new use cases.”
DXC’s solution accelerators helped establish modern data warehouse capabilities with standard reporting templates and design patterns, architecture platform patterns, and managed services centres, allowing the system to be built quickly and with lower risk. The general manager commented, “Having done this many times previously, the expertise and accelerators that DXC brought to the project made a significant difference to the implementation. The team worked in partnership with us and always provided the right advice and support to guide us through the process and ensure success.”
“The expertise and accelerators that DXC brought to the project made a significant difference to the implementation.”
— data and analytics general manager, integrated services provider
The future
DXC works alongside the integrated services provider, providing ongoing managed services, support, and advice to evolve the analytics platform to match growing maturity levels. Future work includes bringing other geographies into the single data warehouse and increasing new reporting tools.
The company is now seeking to expand other information management capabilities such as metadata management and data governance.
This will include creating a data catalogue across the organisation to provide a single source of information on data architecture.
AI and Machine Learning (ML) capability is also a significant part of future plans to further increase the proactive approaches to data analysis. Using AI and ML algorithms, the integrated services provider will be better able to generate the insights required to identify and leverage new opportunities and support niche requirements as they emerge.