Denver Water, the largest municipal public utility in Colorado, faced challenges in enterprise reporting using manual processes and disparate data sources.
Enterprise Reporting Tool for Denver Water
Client Location
United States
Industry
Public Sector
Solutions
Data Engineering
Technologies
Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft SQL
Client Overview
Denver Water is Colorado's largest municipal public utility, serving water to over one million residents, accounting for approximately one-quarter of the state's population. Denver Water sought to modernize its reporting capabilities to support the growing demands of its Enterprise Project Management Office and provide more efficient reporting for stakeholders.
Challenges
Denver Water relied on Microsoft Excel templates to manage its enterprise reporting, which involved various manual processes such as aggregation, validation, formatting, and distribution. Data used for project reporting was collected and maintained in different systems and spreadsheets across the organization, making the reporting process labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Manual Reporting Processes
The reporting processes involved manual aggregation, validation, and formatting, leading to inefficiencies and increased potential for errors.
Data Fragmentation
Data was scattered across multiple systems, making it challenging to consolidate and maintain a unified view.
Need for a Centralized System
Denver Water needed an enterprise-scale reporting tool to support organization-wide reporting needs and provide a unified platform for maintaining, editing, and analyzing data.
Solution
Intellectyx partnered with Denver Water to design, develop, and implement an Enterprise Reporting Tool (ERT) to streamline the organization's reporting processes and improve data quality.
Key Features of the Solution:
- Cloud-Hosted Data Platform: A cloud-hosted data visualization and reporting platform was proposed, leveraging Microsoft Azure Stack, with the ability to integrate with multiple data sources via built-in and custom connectors.
- Data Centralization: Data from disparate data sources was ingested into Azure Data Lake Storage using scheduled data pipelines. This created a centralized repository for data storage and enabled data consistency across departments.
- Data Cleansing and Transformation: Data profiling and cleansing processes were conducted using Azure Databricks/Apache Spark, ensuring high-quality data before loading into Azure SQL Data Warehouse for reporting purposes.
- Enterprise Reporting: Power BI was used for data visualization, creating interactive reports, drill-down and roll-up capabilities, and dashboard reporting to meet Denver Water's diverse business requirements.
- Master Data Synchronization: The central master data was linked to all participating applications and synchronized with enterprise business processes to maintain data consistency and accuracy.
Results
Upon completion, the City of Westminster achieved:
- Centralized Data Management: The Enterprise Reporting Tool enabled Denver Water to normalize and centralize the collection of data into a centralized data warehouse, improving data consistency and accessibility.
- Enhanced Data Visualization: The Power BI integration allowed Denver Water to create interactive reports with drill-down and roll-up capabilities, providing stakeholders with easy access to insights in real-time.
- Increased Efficiency: By automating data collection, transformation, and reporting processes, the solution reduced manual efforts and minimized errors, leading to more efficient and timely reporting.
