Transforming Operational Reporting
The Situation
A leading provider of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) media, software, and compliance services had grown rapidly and made several acquisitions in recent years while under the majority-ownership of a global private equity firm. Although some systems consolidation took place, the Company still maintained multiple accounting, CRM, and ERP systems which restricted its ability to quickly form a holistic view of the enterprise. Furthermore, as the Company invested deeper into its SaaS businesses, it faced limitations due to non-standardized data collection and tracking processes. Accordion was tasked with establishing a cloud-based business intelligence infrastructure for the Company, developing analytics and dashboards to increase visibility, and repositioning the Company for an exit.
Services
BI Systems Selection & Setup
Stakeholder Reporting & KPI Development
Big Data Analytics
Finance Function Automation
The Execution
- Worked with key constituents across the organization to determine the key KPIs required for strategic decision-making.
- Formulated a historical data set that highlighted the Company’s software and SaaS businesses for an eventual exit.
- Deployed the foundations of a cloud-based business intelligence data warehouse and analytics platform in coordination with the Company’s IT department – utilizing components such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Storage, SharePoint Online, and Power BI.
- Consolidated raw excerpts from the Company’s disparate accounting, CRM, and ERP systems into a centralized repository, or “data lake,” from which a tabular-style semantic data model serving as the underlying processing engine for metrics calculations was constructed.
- Built interactive dashboard pages by leveraging the Company’s new business intelligence platform, data lake, and semantic data model.
- Created supporting backup schedules that covered a wide variety of financial and operating metrics that used company-specific business logic.
- Introduced representative SaaS metrics into the Company’s go-forward reporting, including annualized recurring revenue (ARR), new vs. expansion vs. churned revenue, retention rates, churn rates, lifetime value (LTV), customer acquisition cost (CAC), LTV-to-CAC ratio, payback period, as well as granular cohort analyses.
The Results
With Accordion’s assistance, the Company’s FP&A team was able to produce monthly dashboards that provided a consolidated view of the Company’s operational performance. In addition, these dashboards could be used to interactively analyze and drill down into key business drivers. Finally, the Company used the designed data lake and related data pipelines for other future ad-hoc analyses and due diligence during the planned exit.