Fortune 100 Medical Device Company

THE CHALLENGE

Before selecting Microsoft Power BI, analysis was done using a combination of Excel and a version of Cognos that was pretty old and used mainly for grabbing some very basic reports.  

The Diagnostics group secures very large and complex global contracts with hospitals, government agencies, distributors, and more.   The Manager of Global Analytics and BI and his team provide the tools for Pricing, Finance and Sales teams to analyze and ensure the profitability of those contracts.    

Changing business needs, demands for timely information and reporting, and the complexity to support users across Finance and the business Sales teams began to require requests to IT for large-scale data projects, which could take up 6+ months to complete. 

But the company didn’t have the luxury of moving slowly.  They needed to move at customer speed.  They made the switch to Power BI. 

With Power BI they could analyze large-scale pricing contracts quickly, without having to go through an IT data-prep and analysis project, and the flexibility to collaborate between Finance and Pricing Teams very quickly on newly identified opportunities as they arose.  

“However, the piece that was still missing  was the ability to change and  interact with the data for the analysis and profitability of contracts.   They needed to get feedback from users  on the numbers.”    

Power BI allows for analysis, but not data entry. And so, Excel was still needed to allow Finance and Pricing teams to collaborate across analysis and what-if scenarios to ensure profitability margins were maintained. Spreadsheet templates were created, shipped out, and the back-and-forth process of managing the templates began: 

• The data had to be collected, validated, and fool proofed.  
• Chasing people down, version control, and ensuring access were constant issues 
• Fixing data problems due to inserted or deleted rows was a painful norm 
• The biggest challenges were the consolidation of the data and dealing with the errors. 
• Then, of course, data had to be refreshed and put back into Power BI to be displayed. 

The whole process was highly intensive and time-consuming – lost opportunity and lost business was the natural outcome of that.   The team needed a more modern way to make the process work better for all of our stakeholders, employees and customers alike.

THE SOLUTION

Power ON’s solution with its write-back to Power BI capabilities was a natural extension to their existing Microsoft stack, investment and skill sets. With its add-ins that snap into Power BI and Excel, they eliminate the manual and cumbersome processes associated with their various analytic projects, beyond their initial Pricing Analysis focus.    

Power ON solutions enable the BI team to support large sets of data and users more efficiently and effectively – primarily in the Pricing, Finance, and Commercial activities – managing high profile and high impact projects with C-Suite exposure.  With a familiar interface, Power ON Visual Planner extends the value of Power BI by giving users the ability to interact with data; input, collect, perform what-if analysis, and save/write-back real time, so data is immediately visible in Corporate Dashboards for Leadership insight. 

Users can now go into Power BI to evaluate contract details and easily modify their own numbers, allowing teams to collaborate and react quicker to headwinds or unforeseen opportunities. Tied to Microsoft Active Directory credentials, it’s easy to secure who can see what information, who could enter, where they can enter it, and when they can enter, which is a huge boost to making sure the data is clean.  And clean data creates better outcomes.  

When users can enter the data directly, they see it in real time and understand how their numbers impact things, without waiting for a multi-hour, day or week refresh as was the case when managing the process before.  Now Finance, Pricing managers, and Executive Leadership can all immediately view the numbers and commentary and see how contracts are trending.   

Power ON solutions has given the team a ton of flexibility and control, and that's a few of the many reasons why they like, and value the solutions so much.

THE RESULTS

Using Power BI together with Power ON, hundreds of large-scale Sales contracts as well as revenue generation and cost savings opportunities, with a high degree of corporate visibility up to the C-suite, are successfully and collaboratively managed, analyzed, and reviewed. 

The result of enabling analysis plus write-back all in Power BI has generated north of $100 million of impact to gross margin for this leading global Medical Device company.   

Significant time-savings are experienced across the Head of BI, end-users (Finance, Pricing, and Commercial Sales) and Executive Leadership. By automating the outdated manual processes the BI Manager alone eliminated the equivalent of 2 full days every month – no longer auditing for and correcting data, technical or consolidation issues.  He stated, “I literally go months without touching anything,” because the users enter their data directly, and the data validations prevent them from doing anything too wrong – it just kind of speeds up the entire process.  

Aside from hard numbers and time savings, using Power BI and the Power ON add-in has meant presenting the data in a timelier fashion to C-Suite and other leadership. The result has been more and timelier questions coming back from the C-suite which in turn means more collaborative thinking and opportunities to have meaningful conversations with customers – strengthening relationships and negotiating better deals for all involved. 

Executive dashboards are more accurate and timelier for high-level decision making, producing more favorable results. 

Bottom line: more control, fewer errors, faster turnaround times, faster analysis, getting information in front of decision makers that need to see it sooner – have generated cost savings, revenue growth, and as the head of BI put it “all sorts of different and wonderful things.”

AFTER

• $100M+ impact to gross margin

• Real-time analysis + planning collaboration

• Instant update of data in Corp dashboards

• More informed decision making 

• More control of data

• React faster to trends

• 100’s of hours saved across data prep, analysis, planning and decision making