The Client

Mid-sized PR Agency, established, successful business that’s growing revenue, expanding their client base and very ambitious.

The Challenge

Their data was disparate which made collation of information challenging, repetitive and slow. For example, they had 4 siloed CRM & Finance systems which required extremely manual processes to create basic monthly reports, presented as multiple spreadsheets. This process was causing frustration amongst the finance team, whilst the staff had little appreciation of the power of data and insights in their business due to their current day to day experience of simplistic but painful reporting.

The CEO & CFO wanted more from their data. They didn’t completely trust the assembled data and had to wait for month end to see comprehensive reports. They had very little visibility of forecasted business from their various teams. The CEO wanted near live updates on key business metrics and the CFO wanted the ability to see what was likely to happen across the business in the next 3-6 months to help allocate resources more effectively.

Ammonite’s Solution

Momentum – The real key to this whole challenge was guiding the Board to agree the key questions they wanted answers to that data could help them with, to drive performance. That’s the start of Data Inspired Decision Making. Ammonite’s senior data experts ran 2 workshops with all stakeholders. From these we diagnosed 3 clear challenges:

1 The Board hadn’t agreed what regular information would be most beneficial to see

2 There were multiple definitions of the same data terms across the business, causing confusion and inaccuracy in reporting

3 The current technical landscape made it very difficult to pull together the siloed data to make it easily consumable

Optimise – Our senior data experts worked with the leadership team to unify definitions & agree the key questions they needed answers to. A small team of Ammonite technical consultants built a cloud based self-service solution, automating the manual process that had previous caused so much strain in the business; & connecting previously siloed data giving staff access to new deep evidence-based insights.

Autonomy – We led training workshops with staff throughout the business to increase data literacy & technical skills. We hired a BI Developer & Data Analyst into the technical team to take the solution forward. We agreed ongoing mentoring of the Board & staff members to keep company on track to becoming a data inspired business.

The Business Benefit

Data collation and reporting is automated, data is uniform and democratized, data management has much improved.

Board & management meetings are now insight-led with self-service dashboards providing valuable insights from previously unconnected correlative data sets. For example:

1. Costs, revenues, and contract length to understand who their truly valuable clients are
2. Promotion survey scores and service purchases to measure marketing success

But the really big win is the ability to efficiently plan resource allocation 3 months out due to the increased visibility on forecasted projects across the business, increasing margins per project by 14%.

Get in touch

To find out how we can help you achieve competitive advantage from data inspired decision making, contact Ammonite.