The client is a technology giant and the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions. It relies on its partner organizations across the globe to promote, expand and retains its business. The client runs a skills Initiative program to promote the sales of their cloud-based products by providing training to customers across the globe through partners. It pays subsidies to partners every month based on the volume of training activities reported. Training activities reported by partners go through a series of validation checks before approval for payment. Successfully validated trainings are processed for payment. Partners resubmit unapproved trainings with corrected data in subsequent weeks for the payment. The client's financial department needs to accrue for unapproved trainings to get an accurate view of actual financial liabilities. TurnB Approach: Following approaches were used:

• We created a master file by consolidating the training data reported individually by all partners in a week to a single file using an algorithm developed in python.
• Identified the net new trainings reported in the consolidated file and added these to already submitted trainings through last week to create the master consolidated file.
• Listed down all the business rules related to subsidy calculation such as type of training, course, the country where the training is conducted, and special SOWs. We devised an algorithm to calculate subsidy for reported trainings covering all these business rules.
• Computed subsidy for all trainings reported by partners using devised logic.
• Identified all the paid transactions from the client’s internal data and calculated the already paid subsidy amount.
• Estimated accruals by reducing already paid amount from the total computed subsidy.

Implications: Following were the outcomes:

• Monthly updated accrual files provided an accurate representation of the actual financial liabilities of the client.
• Partner, country and region level views of accruals catered to different stakeholders of the client.
• Accrual figures for scheduled trainings helped the finance team in budgeting and forecasting related activities.

Business Challenge:

The client is a technology giant and provides training on the latest tools and services to its top customers with the help of its partners. The client wanted to visualize the training requests in a consolidated manner to help calculate trainers utilized on a weekly basis and plan trainings according to the availability of trainers. They approached TurnB to design a report to visualize training data in a concise view.

TurnB Approach:

• The training requests received from each partner were consolidated into a uniform format.
• A condensed view of all the trainings, including its timing was designed for each solution area.
• The trainings were arranged in customer-order to help with customer-wise analysis.
• Weekly utilization of trainers for each solution area was calculated.

Implications:

Following were the outcome after the approach:

• Consolidated view of the scheduled trainings helped to comprehend the upcoming trainings for each customer easily.
• Week-wise analysis of trainings were possible through the designed view, which helped to estimate the number of trainers required in the coming weeks and plan the trainings according to the trainer's capacity.
• Calculation of trainer utilization helped in auditing the trainer consumption provided by each partner for invoicing the client.
• This also enabled the client to optimize the trainer capacity to be reserved by each partner for the next fiscal year.

Business Challenge:

The largest retail and distribution giants in GCC approached TurnB to develop a dashboard for evaluating the sales performance of various stores under the group. The client also wanted a proper benchmark to evaluate the sales performance of their brand-new store.

They were using an Excel-based heuristic process to measure the sales performance because of which there was inefficient data mining and poor organizational visibility in each store which made it difficult for them in identifying the top/ underperforming areas and its underlying causes.

We collaborated with the client to develop an automated and comprehensive BI dashboard depicting all key metrics to evaluate the sales performance from organizational to category-brand level, in both existing and new stores which will make it easier for the client to highlight the top/underperforming areas and provide a deep dive in those areas to decode the underlying causes. We also helped the client in setting up a proper benchmark.

TurnB Approach:

We identified the data sources for analysis in consultation with the stakeholders and following approaches were done to rectify this problem:

• Missing values, data discrepancies, outliers, etc were checked. After which the data were extracted, treated, and maintained to ensure the data correctness and better performance of the dashboard
• For the existing stores, the previous year sales were set as the criteria upon which the current year sales were evaluated and compared
• For the brand-new store, the month-over-month sales changes of their existing stores were taken into consideration. The client being the largest retail and establishment giant in GCC, this logical benchmarking depicts the current market patterns as well
• We identified and formulated the key metrics and KPI’s for sales comparison and incorporated metrics in the dashboard that could be sliced and diced with ease from organizational to category brand level
• The dashboard design and metrics placement were done in an intuitive manner in order to identify the top/underperforming areas and to comprehend the impact
• Key features of Power Bi like ‘Live connection to existing reports, Direct Query, Cross report drill- through etc. which would minimize the data load and improve the dashboard performance as well as Drill-through, tooltip, bookmark, advanced DAX etc. to enhance the dashboard experience’ were implemented

Implications:

The old standalone manual reporting was replaced with a readily available, automated BI dashboard which resulted in following outcomes:

• This approach of end-to-end automation allowed the client to set up a daily sales monitoring process
• It enabled smoother reporting, improved data integrity and reduction in manual labor/cost
• Setting up a logical benchmark helped the client to compare and evaluate the sales performance of their brand-new store
• The client could readily identify the focus areas of growth/ de-growth
• By correlating and analyzing the key sales-driving factors the client could perform a root cause analysis of the focus areas
• This enabled users to take proactive measures by discovering which lever needs to be pulled/optimized for maximizing sales and margin

With this approach, there was proper organizational visibility for the client, because of which they could easily identify the top/ underperforming areas and its underlying causes, and the client was able to compare and evaluate the sales performance at ease.