Introduction
First Quartile Consulting is a utility focused firm based in North America that offers consulting and benchmarking services to help their clients achieve measurable performance improvements. A significant basis for their consulting is to compile and maintain a large database of measurements collected from many utility companies related to various aspects of customer service and other critical business metrics.
Challenge
The process of collecting the data has always been a huge time drain for First Quartile resources. They had to maintain a historical spreadsheet with all previous questions and responses. Each year they would create a question master spreadsheet for all questions that needed to be responded to for the year. Then they duplicated it for each utility company and populated any previous year responses for each. Once this was all set up, they emailed the questionnaire spreadsheets to more than 80 utility companies for them to provide input for the tracked metrics for the current year. Finally, once the spreadsheets were returned a massive merging process began. By the time this was all completed, it was almost time to prepare for next year. The elimination of this spreadsheet juggling process was becoming a priority to increase business efficiencies and to provide a more value-added consulting effort. First Quartile also created a variety of charts and graphs on top of their historical data using their Business Intelligence software so they wanted to keep this part of their process while eliminating the spreadsheets.
Selection Process
Debi Cook, program director for benchmarking at First Quartile, was tasked with looking for a software solution to replace their spreadsheet-based process. She researched the market and narrowed her search to software that had a strong back-end database, a flexible data entry UI, and the ability to easily extract or read the data into their existing Business Intelligence framework.
After a series of demonstrations and detailed analysis, First Quartile selected Intellimas, a low code app building framework from Singletree Technologies. They felt that Intellimas checked all their major requirements’ boxes and Singletree was expert at handling complex processes. The spreadsheet view in Intellimas was very important since they were replacing a spreadsheet process, and all end users were already familiar with this interface. Singletree also had a track record of a willingness to make product changes where it made sense in case this became a requirement.
Solution
Debi Cook worked directly with our Sr. Application Specialist, Suzanne Johnson to come up with the configuration plan. The goal was to streamline the process while keeping much of the questionnaire logic the same so that the historical and glossary data would remain referenced for any of the audience involved. Here are the major components of the solution design which would lend themselves to a cohesive portal for the utility companies while allowing First Quartile to properly administer and oversee the data management:
- Debi and Suzanne designed a question master which housed all possible questions and a selection by year which allowed various questions to come in and out of the current cycle.
- Form and grid views were set up along with the related history allowing utility company end users to either upload or input their answers as needed.
- Security was set up so that each utility company would only have to access to their own data. Configurable dashboard buttons were set up to allow these end users to take them right to pertinent questions, so they did not need to build searches each time they used the app.
- Validations were built in so that proper data was input at the source.
- Reports were created for First Quartile administrators to examine all responses, or lack thereof, so that they could more easily manage the entire process by exception.
- Extracts were created so that First Quartile could push the responses to their existing dashboard chart framework. This was critical because many hours of work previously went into these charts.
Benefits Realized
- The elimination of the juggling of scores of questionnaire spreadsheets saved a bunch of time in the setup and response process. This should improve even more next year because the process will be more mature.
- First Quartile was able to leverage their investment of time in dashboard charts as well as their historical data and glossaries.
- The learning curve and change management for the new system was lower than what would normally be expected due to the spreadsheet view and because the historical and glossary data was able to be migrated in with changes.
- The management oversight of the responses is an easier process as it can be managed by exception. Plus, more value-added time can be spent troubleshooting responses and looking at trends rather than juggling spreadsheets.
Conclusion
The First Quartile and Singletree team worked extremely well together which allowed for a quick configuration design phase and ultimately a solution which worked well for the end users and administrators. Both teams have experience dealing with multi-discipline projects and the Intellimas software has been used for many complex projects. All of this led to a successful project.
About First Quartile Consulting
First Quartile Consulting is a utility consulting firm that offers a combination of consulting and benchmarking services to help clients achieve measurable performance improvements. Founded in 2007 by consultants with over 35 years of experience, First Quartile Consulting is the leading provider of benchmarking services to the utility industry in the areas of customer service, distribution, transmission, and corporate services.
About Singletree Technologies
Founded in 2001, Singletree develops applications that are designed with usability and flexibility in mind. We know that an application needs to adapt to each client’s business. We also know that no matter how well the application fits the business, if it doesn’t allow the end-user to work in an efficient and time-saving manner, we have not hit the mark. Complementing the software, our consultants are experts at understanding your business process and transforming that into the right set of functionality.
