Cutwel: From Data to Decisions using Power BI

Cutwel are very customer facing, and work with their customers everyday to understand their specific needs and requirements for specialised precision tools. One of the biggest challenges they had begun to face was that the systems and reports they were using had become outdated, ran slowly, and were unable to clearly provide the data the team needed to support customers with their products.

With huge amounts of data, Cutwel saw an opportunity to transform and restructure their insights to drive business efficiencies and provide a more personalised service to their customers. They also needed to set the foundations for future use of AI and LLMs.

For this they needed their data insight strategy to be as precise and effective as possible.  

It was clear that a keen eye on how Cutwel can strengthen their use of Power BI would be a great place to start. BCN addressed key stakeholders at Cutwel, including engagement with the CEO, their Sales Director and the IT team to demonstrate how a business case can be created for the Power BI project.  

This allowed an open forum of shared knowledge and understanding between everybody involved and aligned the methodology and benefit expectations of what success would look like.  

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Data hygiene and efficiency should always form the foundation of any Power BI project. It’s easy to allow legacy systems, existing methodology and user behaviour to dictate the productivity of any digital tools. Working in clear steps allowed the BCN team to design, deploy and detail every change made in a focussed way.  

BCN began by auditing the data use at the backend of their existing Power BI solution. The aim here was to optimise its value through proper data aggregation. Essentially, this involved collecting and compiling data from every source, in every format, across the Cutwel infrastructure to make it valuable for business intelligence and insights.  

One of the initial wins for this step was the improved resource consumption and refresh time of the Cutwel Power BI Dashboard. This had been a significant driver for the entire project to enhance and support a better and more useful employee experience of Power BI reporting.  

Power BI is a visual medium that must be led by an intuitive user experience. A complete cosmetic overhaul of the dashboard for Cutwel placed employees at the heart of the solution to ensure it aligned with their operational workflows and processes in this way.  

Reworking the appearance of the dashboard meant that employee adoption and innovation will increase on the system. It also provided more support for training and development across users.

BCN builds solutions with scalability and adaptability in mind. A phased approach allows priorities to be implemented based on the value and importance of the tasks, while ensuring data security in a complete way. Only once the data issues had been successfully addressed was this element ready for User Acceptance Testing.  

Knowing that the value of Power BI comes from people using it correctly and consistently underpins every phase. The business objectives were clear, so the steps that were taken could always refer to them.  

The BCN client relationship prioritises the empowerment of users for the digital tools they use. Extensive training, support and guidance on Power BI encouraged Cutwel’s people to independently create and develop reports, insight and business intelligence on the new solution.  

Cutwel’s people and data are their business. BCN’s ongoing support and training affords them the confidence to navigate the system and mine the value from it that only their experience can. It creates the perfect bridge between these two elements for the organisation.

Unlocking the value potential of transformative tools such as Power BI has benefits across the business. For Cutwel they saw value and new opportunities immediately in three key areas.  

Empowered People  

The Cutwel team are now armed with the necessary training and confidence to use Power BI in the most impactful way. Importantly, they will also be able to explore new insights and reporting to unlock workflow improvements and opportunities. They also have BCN as a constant resource to support it all.  

Improved Efficiency  

With data from all sources correctly and cleanly compiled, the foundation of the Power BI backend is optimised for delivery. Refresh times that are so important for stock levels and online operations are significantly reduced to provide more constantly actionable data.  

Data Understanding  

The entire process was built on a valuable and collaborative strategy and consultation between BCN and Cutwel. This allowed Cutwel to understand their data in a more comprehensive and cohesive way, identifying key gaps to address, highlighting new opportunities to pursue and driving better decision-making capabilities.  

Cost Efficiency  

BCN knows that the bottom line must be a defining consideration for any tech investment. We helped BCN navigate through the cost justification with a solid business case that they could build upon in a simple way. The return on that investment as part of a wider company strategy is proving to be a big success in a very short time.  

Opening up the real power of Power BI has led to a transformative shift in understanding what is possible for Cutwel. This applies culturally across the business as much as it does for their tech tools. Together, we are now exploring the integration of Large Language Models (LLM) into the Power BI system for augmented AI capability.  

BCN has fostered a new commitment to insights through innovation at Cutwel that will shape the long-term strategies for productivity and efficiency. Our ongoing relationship will be there to help them make it all happen.