Remove the Uncertainty in Your Reporting
McNish Steel is a family owned and operated rebar fabrication business based in Edmonton, Alberta. Founded in 1978, they have always been run with a focus on fostering potential for their clients and their people. With this in mind, Marion Fyshe, VP Sales & Projects, reached out to Pontem Innovations to see if we could improve their reporting and the sophistication of their analytics. McNish wanted to consolidate their information from different parts of their business into an Executive Dashboard that could provide both a high level snapshot of company performance and a detailed view of operational results.
Challenge
McNish needed a tool that could automate the reporting of strategic metrics into an interactive dashboard. Their existing process of manually updating these key metrics from different systems into excel was time consuming and resulted in inconsistent reporting timeframes. When McNish approached Pontem they asked if there was a better way? Our answer was an emphatic yes!
Strategy
To get started, Pontem’s expert advisors worked with McNish’s leadership team to review the existing metrics, confirm what was most valuable to their strategic decision making and then prioritized our work accordingly. This planning exercise was very important as it ensured the reporting tied to their strategic goals and day to day operations. We then moved forward with the follow steps:
Identify the source location of the required data
Connect Power BI to the required sources
Frequent check in meetings with stakeholders to receive feedback
Roll out of the reporting in the cloud based Microsoft Power BI App, so it can be accessed on any device at any time
Timelines for ongoing periodic updates were agreed upon
Results
Within six weeks McNish had an Executive Dashboard in place that allowed them to view and share their data in an automated, interactive way. They can now set targets for their employees and measure their progress while simultaneously monitoring the company’s growth. Instead of spending time searching for and consolidating the data required to understand their progress, leadership can now spend that time working with their team to improve results and reach their potential.
The power of the Executive Dashboard is that it provides leadership clarity on their business performance while removing the uncertainty of who’s collecting the data, when it’s being updated and how it’s being utilized.
““The most significant outcome that came out of this project was that we realized that as a medium-sized business we can still find affordable and useful ways to utilize the data we collect to help build our business. So often we think that it’s something that is out of reach or not affordable but Pontem made it possible. It also made us start thinking about the ways in which we can use data effectively and; more importantly, have important conversations about what data really matters and what data doesn’t.””