From Data Gaps to Meaningful Insights: A Manufacturing Success Story 

Key Metrics: 

We are three months into this assignment, and the client is extremely pleased with all the results, and unequivocally, expectations are being met. Our contractor has been noted to bring great insights to team meetings, and discussions around what is needed. More importantly, visible results are being experienced around trial balancing, and how Power BI is interacting with their Data Warehouses to help build meaningful analysis. 

The Challenge: 

A new CFO was hired after the company faced some turbulence brought on by some external market pressures that was not expected. Part of what this new CFO was tasked with was a better understanding of what all the company data was telling them in terms of organizational and financial performance. In a nutshell, the industry recession they were in the middle of forced them to lay off the talent enabling this analysis, and they needed to bring it back but on a project basis. The task was to find someone that could build visual dashboards, develop KPI’s, and enrich reporting models by accessing the data lakes and warehouses they had. There was nobody on staff capable, so they needed our help. 

The Solution: 

We met via MS Teams to discuss the scenario and needs, and I was joined by Pam Hickey, an AE on the IT Recruiting team, to make sure we had all our bases covered. We made sure to record the meeting so we could go back and make sure no information was lost in conversation. Through this meeting, and in the resulting analysis and conversation, it was clear they needed someone with and FP&A background that also was an elite business intelligence analyst that had experience with Power BI and had done the work they needed in a very similar fashion. The client was ok with the person being fully remote with created a very wide net for us to cast, but we were confident we could execute in the time frame asked. Also, we were up against another firm that the CFO has used in his prior stops, so we knew we needed to work effectively and fast. 

The Result: 

We created a web ad and sent it out far and wide and promoted the role on social media as well. There was an avalanche of interest, but we knew not all of it was real or even representing real people. Such is a challenge in cases like this sometimes. So, we had to make sure we parsed down to only the very closest matches and started making contact with those people to make sure they were genuine applicants. My recruiting partner, Luke Strawhecker, led this part of the process. Through it, we found a candidate that interviewed a few times, performed some sample analysis, and was offered the role.