"You have really helped us get clarity around our complex requirements so everyone knows exactly what we're talking about and how that fits into the big picture."

A booster sprint supported by QR_’s ‘Special Projects’ software development team resulted in significant improvements to the client’s dashboards used to report out vehicle requirements.

The granularity and usability of the client’s dashboards were greatly improved by implementing a new highly robust, scalable, and efficient Excel-based data architecture.

Excel Data Model + DAX (Data Analysis Expressions):

• Calculation Efficiency - a performance boost (up to 100x) was observed when performing roll-up calculations (to aggregate data) with DAX rather than Excel formulas and Power Query transformations.
• Scalability - the Excel Data Model stores data in memory rather than spreadsheet cells and is not limited by size.
• Increased Granularity - the granularity of reporting dashboards were increased by a factor of 5, to show the full depth of the vehicle requirements’ hierarchical structure.
• Separation of Concerns - relationships between data tables allowed smaller manageable tables with simpler calculations to be used rather than a single slow complex table.

Power Pivot dashboards:

• Power Pivot - direct integration between the Excel Data Model and tables, charts, and slicers enables data to be drilled into by grouping/ungrouping the hierarchical data.
• Data Caching - allows dashboards to be filtered on-the-fly without waiting for slow data refreshes, allowing users to quickly get the right view for their reporting needs.