Business Intelligence Services

• when you have amassed a large volume of business data that is not utilized in making decisions
• when you cannot keep up with user requests for new dashboards and reports.
• or when you are tired of Excel moving slow and not being able to process more than 1 million rows.

Deciding between hiring an in-house business intelligence team and outsourcing to an agency depends on several factors that align with your company’s strategic direction, budget, and long-term objectives. Here are some considerations based on the information provided:

Advantages of Outsourcing to an Agency:

1. Diverse Expertise: Agencies typically offer a broader range of skills and expertise, which can be beneficial if your analytics needs are varied or if you require specialized knowledge.

2. Cross-Industry Experience: Partnering with an agency gives you access to best practices and valuable insights gained from a wide array of industries, which can enrich your business intelligence approach.

3. Flexible Engagement Models: Agencies offer different collaboration models, from pay-as-you-go to dedicated resources, giving you flexibility in how you manage and budget for analytics services.

4. Scalability: With an agency, you can quickly scale your BI capabilities up or down based on your current needs without the constraints of headcount and recruitment.

5. High Availability: Agencies prioritize client support and often plan their resources to ensure uninterrupted availability, which can be crucial for ongoing and time-sensitive analytics needs.

Disadvantages of Outsourcing:

1. Initial Onboarding: Consultants may require time to become familiar with your company and industry. However, this is often mitigated by the agency’s experience and ability to learn quickly.

2. Internal Resistance: Employees might be hesitant to work with external consultants. It’s essential to have management buy-in and foster a collaborative environment to ensure successful integration of external expertise.

3. Cost Considerations: While agencies might have a higher hourly cost compared to in-house salaries, they can provide value through flexibility, lack of long-term commitments, and by offering a variety of pricing models to suit different needs.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a broad range of analytics skills, need flexible and scalable support, and want to benefit from cross-industrial experience without the commitment of hiring full-time staff, outsourcing to an agency might be the right choice for you. However, if you prefer to have analytics expertise embedded within your team and are prepared to invest in hiring and training, building an in-house team could be beneficial. It’s recommended to weigh both options carefully and consider reaching out to agencies for quotes to better understand the potential costs and benefits.

Our services mainly cater to mid sized companies that have reached an inflection point where they can no longer effectively manage their operations, sales, marketing using Excel and Google Sheets. We cover the full spectrum of services such as data analytics consulting, data engineering, database administration, business intelligence and data science.

We can take care of the entire process of setting up an effective data analytics architecture from scratch or alternatively, however we can also help with targeted modular services.

For example, some of our customers have reached out to us when they needed to speed up the development and delivery of dashboards. As such, we have helped them with Business Intelligence development while they chose to keep data engineering capabilities in house.

We have also had customers contract us to audit or refresh the look and feel of their dashboards and product interfaces.

The greatest differentiator consists in the way we mix data visualization best practices with user requirements.

With close to 20 years of experience of building reports and dashboards in Excel, Power Pivots, Tableau, Domo, Looker, Looker Studio, PowerBI, Qliksense and IBM Cognos, and having built operational and strategic dashboards and scorecard for various functions and industries, we know that adoption is ensured when user requirements are met with data visualization best practices.

We have worked with Affiliate Marketing, FMCG, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Transportation and Airlines, Logistics, SaaS and IT, Media and Advertising, Telecomm, Retail and Dealership companies.

Absolutely, please navigate to our Case Studies page and browse through the examples we have showcased there.

Our go to BI tools are PowerBI, Tableau and Domo but we also have experience with Looker Studio, QlikSense, MicroStrategy, Sisense, and Tibco Spotfire.

As consultants always say, “it depends”. Jokes aside, read our product roundup article Domo vs Tableau vs PowerBI. 

Nevertheless, this is not a decision to be treated lightly. Migrating 1 or 2 years down the line to a different platform can come with costs higher than $200K.

No.

The moment you need to customize, blend and join data sources or perform a decent table calculation, it leaves you down.

Our approach to data visualization and reporting starts with a discussion with the end business users and stakeholders. We start by shadowing and understanding the process as it is and document the necessary tabs, visuals, functionalities and KPIs.

We propose a report structure, after which we work our way back to identify the necessary data, the underlying data sources and the way we are going to connect to it.

After preparing the report, we perform quality checks to validate that our reports are alligned with the underlying data sources and the previous reports you were using. We also guide the end user through QA to ensure we have their sign off on data accuracy.

We develop the dashboard by mixing best practices with user requirements to ensure that the final dashboard will be clear and user friendly.

Yes, BI tools allow for a decent degree of customization. When we develop a dashboard, we like to take into account and implement your company’s branding guidelines.

Reports and dashboards are a great opportunity to showcase your brand and we want to take advantage of that real estate, especially when we are designing reports that are going to be available to the general public.

Usually no. Designing it in Figma requires double the effort, duration and costs.

Developing a dashboard is usually very straight forward so it’s best that you witness the various stages it is going through so you can provide feedback that we will swiftly incorporate.

However, if you really need a mock-up first, we can design it in Figma.

Yes. This is known as writeback capability. There are very few BI tools that are able to do that, especially PowerBI (with PowerApps) and our partners at www.scaidata.com.

However, you might be looking for a web application instead. Here is our guide that highlights the differences.

Let’s talk to see what is the best solution for your needs.

Yes, you can do that using Embedded Analytics. Most providers support it but it can be quite expensive.

Moreover, if you app offers single sign on, it becomes more complicated.

If you need to build a dashboard as part of a product but you want it to look amazing, we recommend using D3.js or Observable Plot.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help.

Building a dashboard that connects to NoSQL databases involves a sophisticated process due to the unstructured nature of the data these databases manage. Traditional BI tools like PowerBI and Tableau are adept at handling structured data, but NoSQL databases present data in formats that these tools don’t natively understand.

While connectors exist to bridge No-SQL databases with BI tools, the process of flattening complex, nested documents into structured tables often yields poor and useless results.

To facilitate this connection, the process starts with the creation of custom ETL scripts. These scripts extract data from NoSQL sources and transform the complex, nested documents into a flat, structured format that BI tools can process. This data is often then written into an SQL-based database, such as MariaDB, which acts as a bridge between the NoSQL data and the BI platform.

For certain scenarios, especially when real-time monitoring or navigating complex, elastic datasets are needed, alternatives to traditional BI platforms might be more suitable. Tools like Grafana are renowned for their real-time data visualization capabilities, while Kibana is optimized for searching and visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch. Apache Superset is another robust option that offers a more flexible data exploration platform capable of integrating with a wide range of databases, including NoSQL.

We understand that data privacy and security are paramount. Here’s how we safeguard your data:

• Ownership and Control: When we develop your data infrastructure, you have complete ownership and control over the architecture, systems, software, and—most critically—the data itself.
• In-Ecosystem Work: Our team operates within your infrastructure, avoiding any data transfer outside your secured ecosystem, ensuring data residency and sovereignty.
• Advanced Security Measures:
  • We implement and use SSH keys and VPNs for secure connections.
  • IP whitelisting and OAuth APIs are standard practice for controlled access.
  • Data encryption both in transit and at rest to protect your information.
  • Frequent password rotations to maintain security integrity.
• Compliance and Standards:
  • Our processes are designed to align with GDPR and CCPA.
  • We readily adapt to meet any specific requirements of your internal security policies.

Apart from implementing widely know best cybersecurity practices, currently we do not have specialized cyber security personnel which is why we recommend and welcome 3rd party or your inhouse resources to regularly test our infrastructures.

Additionally, we understand the importance of accountability and are willing to explore obtaining insurance coverage that addresses potential damages directly attributable to our services. While we are dedicated to the highest standards of excellence and vigilance, we also recognize the necessity of defining liability.

In the unlikely event of damages and unless specifically insured for, our liability is capped at the total amount billed for our services in the preceding six months of our collaboration. This provision is part of our commitment to transparency and mutual trust in our business relationships.

Your data’s security is our top priority, and we commit to maintaining the highest standards of cybersecurity practices.

If you’re considering our business intelligence and data visualization services, know that we prioritize a partnership approach to pricing. We want to ensure that our services align with your goals and provide clear value. Here’s an outline of how our pricing models can work for you:

1. Time and Material: Suited for projects where the scope may vary, this pay-as-you-go option offers the flexibility to adjust requirements as your project evolves. We’ll work with you to estimate the effort involved and ensure transparency and fairness in billing.

2. Retainer Fee: If you have ongoing analytics needs, our retainer service ensures dedicated support for a set number of hours each month. It’s a great way to secure our team’s availability without the commitment of a full-time hire.

3. Dedicated Resource: For businesses that anticipate a consistent, high-volume workload, we offer the option of dedicated resources. This model provides you with a team or individual fully focused on your business intelligence needs for a sustained period, offering stability and deep integration with your operations.

We understand that each business’s needs are unique, and we’re committed to providing a pricing structure that reflects that.

For a detailed quote that’s tailored to your business’s specific data visualization requirements, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our team is ready to discuss your objectives and how we can align our services for the best outcome.

The duration of a business intelligence project varies greatly depending on its scope and complexity.

For specific tasks like one dashboard development it can range from a few days to two weeks.

More comprehensive projects, such as developing dashboards for multiple departments within the company, from executive to operational levels, may span several months to a few years.

We’re committed to flexibility and try to scale our resources to meet project deadlines as needed. While we’ve shifted focus towards longer-term collaborations, our goal remains to provide tailored, impactful data visualization services that foster enduring partnerships.

Engaging with our data visualization services is a simple and straight forward process, ensuring we align with your business needs every step of the way.

Here’s how it works:

Before Contract Engagement

1. Initial Consultation: It all starts with booking a meeting where we discuss your business objectives and how our business intelligence consulting services can align with your goals. We conduct a detailed discussion to understand your business strategy and objectives. This helps us explain and show how data can be transformed into actionable insights for your organization.

2. Tailored Proposal: Based on our discovery meeting, we draft a custom proposal outlining the approach, services offered, and the estimated impact on your business.

3. Contract Finalization: After reviewing the proposal with you and incorporating any feedback, we finalize the terms and sign the contract, setting the stage for our collaboration.

After Contract Engagement

1. Onboarding & Data Integration: Our team sets up the necessary infrastructure for data ingestion, processing, and reporting, ensuring a smooth start to our partnership.

2. Solution Implementation: We implement the best bi solution for your needs that can also include setting up infrastructure, integrations, and the development any agreed-upon dashboards.

3. Training & Capacity Building: To ensure you get the most out of our services, we provide comprehensive training for your staff on the new systems and tools.

4. Ongoing Support & Optimization: We offer continuous support, including performance monitoring and optimization, to ensure the solutions evolve with your business.

For more detailed information and to get started with transforming your data into strategic assets, contact us for a personalized consultation.

Absolutely, we encourage you to read the Testimonials section on our homepage.

At Witanalytica, staying at the forefront of business intelligence is central to our approach. We actively keep ourselves informed through various channels, including industry news, to ensure we’re aware of the latest developments.

Our team personally tests emerging technologies, often being among the first to access new tools and features through early sign-ups and beta programs. We also delve into product releases and updates, ensuring that we understand the capabilities and applications of new technologies. Beyond external research, we dedicate time for internal projects, experimentation, and training.

This hands-on approach allows us to not only stay updated but also to critically evaluate and integrate new technologies and methods into our solutions, ensuring our clients always benefit from cutting-edge analytics.

At Witanalytica, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of our data analysis is foundational to our approach. We adhere to stringent data quality standards, focusing on accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability.

Our process involves rigorous data validation techniques to minimize errors. We tackle common data quality challenges, such as incomplete data, duplicates, data integration issues, and outdated information, by implementing best practices like setting mandatory fields, using data cleaning tools, standardizing data across systems, and establishing regular data refresh schedules.

To maintain the highest data quality, we also ensure data security, assign clear accountability and ownership of data sets, and conduct regular data audits. This comprehensive approach not only mitigates the risk of inaccurate insights but also supports informed decision-making and maintains our clients’ trust.

For a deeper dive into our data quality assurance practices and the importance of high-quality data in analytics, feel free to read more in our detailed article: Data Quality: How to Ensure Your Data Analytics Deliver Accurate Insights

After a project’s completion, our support at Witanalytica doesn’t just end. We actively monitor the dashboards for alerts and triggers to ensure continuous, smooth operation.

Maintenance of existing dashboards takes precedence, ensuring they perform optimally before we embark on developing new ones. We offer flexible support options tailored to your needs — from a fixed maintenance fee to time-and-material billing for any necessary adjustments or maintenance. This approach allows us to swiftly adapt to changes, such as updates in data sources to ensure that your reports remain accurate.

Moreover, we’re committed to the success and adoption of our solutions. We regularly measure and monitor their usage because we believe in delivering not just solutions, but value that is actively utilized and drives results. Our goal is to ensure that the reports we develop are not only technically sound but also widely adopted and impactful.