Dentsu Germany: High data quality and smart BI interfaces with GAPTEQ
Collecting, expanding and cleaning data for the financial data warehouse, developing applications for management and finance, and security concept.
The client
As part of a global agency group, Dentsu Germany is one of the top five German providers of communications and media consulting services. Its 1,500 employees, spread across five locations, mainly serve global players, including DAX-listed companies.
The project
Data maintenance for the financial data warehouse; BI applications
Data is generally very important in the media industry. This applies to customer service as well as to business management issues – with the special feature at Dentsu Germany of managing the networked agencies across locations. Therefore, the decision was made to set up a financial data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server technology.
Highlights
Challenge
The stated goal was to create a single point of truth across Germany for the cross-system evaluation and analysis of all financial data relevant to management. This first required the master data from upstream systems such as SAP/R3, SAP BW and an ORACLE-based media system to be revised and enriched.
Solution
To achieve this, Dentsu Germany turned to GAPTEQ: with minimal effort using drag & drop, a flexible and very fast solution was created to collect the necessary data, enrich it where necessary, and consolidate it. GAPTEQ masks were used to add groupings and summarisation characteristics as well as targets for agency management. Unlike with conventional use of Excel, the entire process was extremely efficient and error-free, especially since data deletions were prevented, as were unwanted entries in free text fields.
At the same time, GAPTEQ was used to create an integrated security concept that allows detailed assignment of access rights for users – at the function and data level. This is used to assign rights for GAPTEQ and the financial data warehouse, as well as for the Power BI dashboards and reports.
Further GAPTEQ applications for finance and controlling followed: within three weeks, the Target app was developed as a forecasting solution for agency managers. Based on the overall planning, they use it to set their targets in several categories. Combined with the actual figures from the data warehouse, the agreed targets can be tracked. This means that agency managers always know what has already been achieved and what still needs to be done. They also update the values via GAPTEQ and transfer them directly to the data warehouse at the touch of a button, where they are available within seconds.
‘GAPTEQ makes our BI solution smart and incredibly flexible – and the low-code platform is as easy to use as an iPhone.’
It took just six weeks to map the OPEX forecasts via GAPTEQ for planning the costs of operational business activities. With the actual figures from previous months now integrated there, it is possible to carry out plan/actual comparisons and budget controls, among other things. Cost centre controlling, which has now been implemented, was also not previously possible with Excel. Thanks to the security concept, department heads can collect their planned figures for each cost centre and consolidate them directly on the server using the uniform data model. As the icing on the cake, a drill-through function has even been integrated at document level. This enables authorised users to trace back and display the corresponding detailed information.
Other GAPTEQ applications are now in use, for example for maintaining customer profiles. These can be used, for example, to assign customers to the relevant agency, define support teams or store detailed information.
Result
GAPTEQ made a significant contribution to improving data quality during the development of the financial data warehouse. The project impressively demonstrated how quickly and easily interfaces for SQL databases can be implemented using low-code technology. The range of applications extends from simple web forms to complex business applications.
‘Traditional programming would be many times more expensive and time-consuming.’
Since then, conventional Excel procedures and all the associated problems have been replaced in many cases in order to map the data from the individual agencies and departments. GAPTEQ implements small applications for internal customers from management and controlling with little effort in order to collect data with high data quality. This data flows into the financial data warehouse and is presented in reports combined with data from the source systems – significantly cheaper and faster than would be possible with classic programming.
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