Customer overview
Leicester College provides further education, post–16 training and Higher Education qualifications. The college supports over 26,000 students ranging in age from 14 to 75. It required better insights into the business information they collected and needed to improve the way they shared that information. Leicester College chose Microsoft Power BI and the 848 Group to support in this business change.
- Leicester College needed a more efficient and agile way to provide and manage business information.
- It was using a dated business information system that was difficult to change and lacked modern features.
- Organic growth of management information had introduced inefficiencies in the structure and processing of data.
- 848 migrated the college away from the legacy system to Power BI, using existing reports to design, build and implement a modern and efficient dashboard supported by Azure data services.
The challenge
Leicester College had several dashboards and reports which were built on the legacy business information platform. The team needed to accurately replicate these before the new academic year to facilitate license cost savings and user adoption.
The solution
848 introduced a Microsoft MVP to help the organisation move from the old solution. The consultant worked with the staff working with business information at Leicester College to ensure that knowledge was transferred during the process. A mentoring approach was taken to allow the college staff to learn through practice. However, where time was short, the consultant delivered the work to ensure deadlines were achieved. During the engagement the consultant:
- Setup Dedicated Power BI database and tables
- Wrote and tested SQL
- Advised on SQL query practice
- Created and tested ETL SSIS packages
- Created a Power BI underlying model including relationships
- Created Power BI drilldowns, drill-throughs, and hierarchies
- Created a Power BI dashboard of visualisations
- Advised on security aspects such as row level security
The outcome
The immediate result is a more efficient and effective management reporting dashboard for Leicester College that is both accurate and timely. In addition, sharing information is simpler and better integrated with the wider Microsoft estate.
However, this first phase also laid the foundations for a better approach to business information. The tools and platform will provide the basis for further phases. At the time of writing plans are being agreed to transform the reporting of room utilisation.
