Analytics & Data Engineering

Automated Endowment Fund Reports Result in Quicker, More Streamlined Reporting 

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A major Canadian University wanted to automate the process of reporting endowment fund expenditures to faculties. The proceeds of endowment funds are used to support academic scholarships, bursaries, and research projects, and are a major component of large academic institutions and their fundraising efforts. Efficient reporting of these funds, their income, expenditures, and unspent balances allows faculties to support the students, scholars, and projects as intended by the donors, while remaining fiscally responsible and avoiding overspending. The existing highly manual and time-consuming process meant that the fund expenditures and balances were often out of date and funds with infrequent activity could easily be forgotten. Unspent funds were an unfortunate but … Read more

Data Collection Upgrade Reduces Technical Debt & Modernizes Data Reports

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food asked Imaginet to perform maintenance on their existing data collection processes. We work in a staff augmentation role for this client and do ongoing work for them. Their data departments are divided into different business areas (we will refer to them as teams). On this project, we were working with two of their teams. Both teams required general maintenance and updates to their data collection tools – essentially a data collection upgrade. Team 1: Their primary focus is collecting and processing data about pet foods and products (nutritional claims they make, calories, ingredients, product history, etc.). This process to … Read more

Power BI Data Model Builds Better and More Accurate Reports

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A major Canadian University had contacted Imaginet because they needed reports built on top of an existing data warehouse. This is a long-term client of Imaginet’s, and we had previously built a data warehouse for another department within the organization. Much of the work for this project was about defining the semantic data model on top of the data warehouse and then building the reports on it.   Before they had a data warehouse, they had multiple applications that were reporting data separately. Since the implementation of the data warehouse, the client wanted to use Power BI as a standard enterprise reporting portal.   Our Solution  We started with creating views in … Read more

Databricks Migration Saves Money and Improves Data Accessibility

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A provider of real estate advisory services contacted Imaginet for support on a system we had built for them a few years ago (mostly built using Azure SQL). They have multiple databases that have monthly costs associated with them. Our client was looking for a cheaper solution as the monthly costs were quite significant. They also had an existing capacity agreement with Databricks, so our goal was to conduct a Databricks migration with our clients databases.   What We Did  We started from scratch and built all the coordinates and objects for our client’s architecture. We used metadata to create their tables and developed a custom autoloader to transfer files to … Read more

Inventory Reporting Tool Optimizes Inventory and Delivery with Data Integration

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A provider of bedding plants for vegetable and herb gardens contacted Imaginet because they were starting to use Go Spot Check and wanted to bring its data into their data warehouse. Go Spot Check is a third-party cloud application that, like many supplementary tools, offers reporting in-app but doesn’t have a reliable or repeatable export method for the raw data. These types of tools can be very useful to organizations but can cause challenges when attempting to retrieve and integrate the data they collect. In this case, our client was in need of an inventory reporting tool. They specifically mentioned their desire to use the Go Spot Check data in collaboration … Read more

Power BI Reports & DevOps Component Improves Data Quality

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A major Canadian University had been experiencing issues with discrepancies in their data reports. They had an existing data warehouse across the entire organization, but the data quality was poor and inaccurate. Therefore, they were in need of a solution that could provide overall improved data quality. The client had expressed their desire to keep the data warehouse currently in place. We determined that data collected and presented in Power BI reports would satisfy the client’s data needs.   What We Did: Power BI  We started by doing work in Power BI that allowed the reports to match up with their evaluation criteria, which involved working heavily in SQL. We then … Read more

Centralized Data Reporting Reduces Wait Times and Improves Reliability

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food contacted Imaginet because the data for their health and safety reporting was slow and failing to load properly. They were working with an online platform called Evotix and pulling data from a web URL to build reports. Additionally, they have numerous factories and therefore have high volumes of data to capture. Each of the factories was attempting to take the data from the Evotix platform to build reports but the web URL couldn’t handle many factories requesting large datasets concurrently and was consequently unreliable. They were in need of a centralized data repository, so all their data could be accessible … Read more

Power BI Reporting Improves Data Quality and Accuracy

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An Information Technology organization specializing in business solutions contacted Imaginet to create a more effective approach to their data reporting. They had been using Excel for reporting purposes and relied on manual manipulation of their data. Using Excel was neither effective nor efficient, and the manual work was leading to data quality issues. We determined the best solution for our client would be through Power BI reporting.   What We Did:  We recreated some of their existing reports in Power BI and created reports using data from Salesforce based on the following 2 requirements:  We changed their data reporting system report by report. To begin, we created the semantic model in … Read more

Effective Data Reporting Leads to Data Accuracy and Consistency

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A well-known consumer packaged goods (CPG) company specializing in pet food asked Imaginet for a solution to provide more effective data reporting across all factories. They had been using PowerPoint slides to report key production metrics, which led to errors and inconsistencies. These inaccuracies were further compounded by failing to validate the data against the actual sources to address data quality issues.   The factories were also building reports independently, so they were inconsistent with one another, and some were reporting on projects outside their scope of responsibility. There were no established data reporting guidelines to adhere to, which led to arguments and confusion. When the PowerPoint reports were shown at … Read more

Migrating to Azure Data Factory Leads to Improved Security and Improved ROI

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A major Canadian oil & gas company reached out to Imaginet to rewrite some of the old infrastructure they currently had in place and pursue an Azure Data Factory migration. Imaginet had built their data warehouse 10 years ago, but changes in technology prompted the client to make changes to their existing data loading processes. We had previously used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to build their data factory, however, migrating to Azure Data Factory had become the better option for their business needs, as they wanted to move from on-premises servers to cloud services in Microsoft Azure.  Our client had started to experience issues with their current on-premises SQL … Read more