Community Health Center is a Federally Qualified whose mission is to eliminate health disparities and foster community well-being by providing and promoting the highest quality care in South L.A. They wanted to define a future BI roadmap which could enable self-service BI solutions for its users. The goal is to define overall architecture of the solution and the primary focus of Phase 1 is to build a next gen BI solution for finance which supports operational requirements while laying down a solid foundation to build future reporting.
Think AI Consulting Corporation, Health center, and Azure Synapse Analytics, Purview, Power BI
Customer challenges
They had an existing reporting environment with data warehouse and SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) based reporting system. The Business Intelligence solution had multiple limitations including no interactivity, slow response, missing ad-hoc reporting capability and high development time of new reports, no single version of truth as every report was using its own query to pull the data rather than using a single data model. This impacted their ability to leverage data effectively.
Partner solutions
Think AI built a Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics with Purview and Power BI. The solution was built using Azure technologies such as Azure Synapse Pipeline, Azure Purview, Azure Data Lake, Azure Dedicated SQL Pools, and Power BI. For each data source, updates are exported periodically into a staging area in parquet files using Change data capture. Data Factory loads the data to staging tables in Azure Data Lake. After loading a new batch of data into the warehouse, business analysts use Microsoft Power BI to analyze warehoused data via the Power BI semantic model.
Customer benefits
Activating the extensible Business Intelligence (BI) platform supported improved access to data, ability to access data from multiple sources, enabled an executive dashboard capability, supported various tools to analyze data like Excel and Power BI, and improved the response time to end-user requests of detailed data.
- Provided the capability to analyze data and reduce the time needed for special analysis to get answers that should be readily available.
- Enabled users to embed reports in external systems like SharePoint online and custom apps.
- Allowed for interactive reporting using filters, slice, sort, etc.