BouwKennis provides strategic market and marketing information to the construction and installation sector and makes it simple. They follow the market and enrich information with quantitative and qualitative market research, which they offer through extensive reports and graphs.
Business case
BouwKennis already had a B2B portal and this tool offers its customers the possibility to generate reports including graphs about e.g. production prognoses, market developments, orientation and purchase behavior of target groups, brand awareness and customer satisfaction. These reports were previously generated from Excel. Power BI was already known to BouwKennis and the desire arose to make the various data streams available for power BI reports via a BI solution. This would make it possible for customers to purchase and view interactive reports themselves via the customer portal. The customer portal had to provide authorization and authentication so that reports would only be visible to paying customers. And the portal had to be delivered in a Dutch & German version.
The result
Customers can view interactive reports (and purchase them directly) by logging into their own environment within the BouwKennis customer portal called BouwKennisData. In addition, manual actions by the back office to generate reports are no longer required.
“For some time, we had been making plans for a comprehensive and flexible data facility for the construction and installation sector. An ambition with a distant horizon where HybrIT emerged as the party that could immediately provide a solid foundation and help us think about future wishes at the same time. Both during and after the delivery, it was easy to make contact and come up with solutions together. With what we have in place now, we can offer more current data and information and are prepared for a future where we can help customers more specifically based on more complex data models.”
Technical challenge
In order to realize this, we set up a BI solution to bring all data flows to one place. Our challenges at a glance:
- Building a custom BI platform;
- Choosing the best technologies to allow all data streams to converge;
- Creating the possibility to make manual adjustments to the platform, so that BouwKennis would not become dependent on HybrIT for this;
- Customize the display of reports;
- Provide the power BI reports with authorization and authentication;
- Setting up a cloud solution so there would be no server management.
Bullet points
- Cloud solution
- Custom reports
- Authentication & authorization
- Scalable to an infinite number of users
- Easily expandable
- Custom BI
- No more manual actions to update data
- New customers create their own portal account
- Existing customers request reports online
“I have been involved in this project from the first conversation with BouwKennis. The collaboration went great. The contact with all the people at BouwKennis was very pleasant. We helped each other out and were able to make choices quickly. The customer regularly attended our demos with several colleagues. We delivered the project on time. Technically, the solution is solid, and we’re proud of that as a team.”