Case Study

Celebrated SaaS Provider for the Trade Industry Uses dbt to Standardize Metrics & Centralize KPI Reporting

The Customer’s Challenge

An all-in-one software as a service (SaaS) provider for trade companies sought to standardize and centralize key performance indicator (KPI) reporting for its sales and marketing teams. They also desired to clearly and consistently define KPIs as an organization and then eliminate reporting discrepancies found across their varied dashboards by moving business logic from their business intelligence tool into the dbt data model.

phData’s Solution

Within nine weeks, phData partnered with the client to unify metric definitions across its key reports. The analytics team at phData then moved the KPI business logic upstream from Tableau into dbt, creating a data model to ensure metric consistency across the organization.

The Full Story

The teams within the sales and marketing department of a leading software as a service provider used different approaches to analyze similar data. Not only did each team have its own process for transforming data, but also their own way of defining key KPIs. This created duplicate work and discrepancies between different organizational reports. 

phData helped solve this issue by standardizing the reporting process across teams. First, phData consolidated the transformation logic in dbt and created a data model that could be leveraged by each team within the department. 

Next, they partnered with the company to eliminate reporting discrepancies by unifying the business logic behind key KPIs.

Once alignment on KPIs was achieved, phData’s team of experts migrated the business logic into dbt, ensuring the same definitions could be used in downstream tools.

Why phData?

The client chose to partner with phData because of previous successfully-completed projects. Over the course of a year, the phData Data Engineering team helped the client migrate from Redshift to the Snowflake Data Cloud, build and orchestrate data integrations, and create a Customer 360 data model in Snowflake. 

Impressed by this past work, the organization leveraged phData’s Reporting, Analytics, & Visualization Services to help solve their current KPI reporting challenges.

Results

By the end of the engagement, the customer had the following:

  1. Organization-wide alignment on metric definitions.
  2. A process for standardizing and centralizing KPIs in dbt.
  3. A scalable data model containing key KPIs.
  4. Tableau dashboards designed to help analyze the conversion funnel.


By connecting to the new data model, analysts could now build reports without having to define complex logic in calculated fields which reduces development time and improves overall data accuracy and reliability.

A simple information architecture that visual shows how everything was setup in dbt.

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