It’s Summertime! Baseball and Automation?
Yay! It’s nearly summer and that means we’re well into baseball season!
Starting in December 2019, Artic Consulting began an engagement with SWBC, a privately-held company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. SWBC was interested in implementing PowerBI reporting to supplement (and possibly eventually replace) their existing Business intelligence solutions. PowerBI allows businesses to easily integrate their data into great looking reports that have a vast array of functionality.
SWBC had recently renewed their software licensing agreement with Microsoft, which provided the company with a PowerBI Premium subscription, as well as adequate PowerBI Pro licenses to cover several of their departments and field representatives. Our primary stakeholder, a Senior Vice President in charge of analytics, successfully championed the idea internally at SWBC and won approval to begin a vendor engagement with Artic to create a new custom customer facing reporting portal. This portal, code-named “MyReports”, would integrate PowerBI reports with SWBC’s existing reporting portal and its proprietary technologies to host the new PowerBI reporting experience.
Artic Consulting’s Business Management Services team began to work with the SWBC stakeholders to define the requirements and gather the details required to create the application. Our Data & Business Insights team worked with SWBC to set up an Azure-based PowerBI Premium instance. It was an important requirement to interface with several existing systems to support a consistent user experience for SWBC customers. First, an existing Header/Footer service provided the SWBC branding and important links to information in both the header and footer of the application. Also important was the need to integrate with SWBC’s security controls, and support role-based access to associate individual users with the specific customer accounts.
Artic’s Application & Systems Engineering team created the MyReports portal for the report selection as a custom application hosted as an Azure App Service, using the latest .NET Core technologies. We were able to successfully interface with SWBC’s Header/Footer Service and security architecture.
The MyReports portal also was designed to display the PowerBI reports that a user has access to using a custom tree navigation in the left pane.
