Help4Access- provider of world-class professional Microsoft Access consulting services, working in conjunction with SESIdw, a Certified Tableau Business Partner, deliver advanced Business Intelligence solutions in the cloud.
Founded in 1994 and based in San Francisco’s Financial District, the KIPP Foundation (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of schools across 20 states serving more than 33,000 students. The KIPP Foundation, which provides leadership and resources for the network, developed a program to gather and track performance data providing the best possible decision-making criteria to administrators as well as identifying critical success factors and best practices.
Although the program was later expanded to include a business intelligence (BI) system consisting of an MS SharePoint website, ETL tools, dashboards and a data warehouse, it still lacked the ability to integrate external survey metrics and the granularity needed for student level data views, so the foundation turned to Help4Access, to extend the system’s functionality even further.
According to Sasha Froyland, Founder and CEO of Help4Access, “One of our greatest challenges was to develop the functionality and data elements required to extend the system, while still ensuring backward compatibility with the original data warehouse and existing dashboards.”
In addition to the data warehouse expansion, the foundation decided to replace existing SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports with Tableau’s interactive data visualization reports which consists of a web-based analytics and BI platform in order to improve usability, interactivity and the speed of deployment.
“Tableau’s rapid-fire business intelligence analytics and its ability to effortlessly combine multiple data sources with a single click, is the perfect solution to meet the foundation’s requirements,” explains Sasha. “And Tableau’s seamless system integration enabled us to build new functionality while maintaining compatibility with the original data warehouse.”
As a certified Tableau partner with extensive background in SQL Server, ETL tools and cloud computing, SESIdw was the ideal company to partner with Help4Access’s team of experienced MS Access database consultants using Agile development methodologies and a GitHub repository. Together the teams were able to rapidly process and merge the external statistical data while ensuring the integrity of the existing data warehouse and dashboards.
The BI project was completed within budget and on schedule, meeting the foundations needs at the school, regional and national reporting levels.
Froyland goes on to say, “This is an important program to prepare students from underserved communities for success in college and in life. We’re very proud to contribute to the overall effectiveness of the program by extending the system capabilities providing the decision support tools needed for the schools and foundation administrators to achieve their goals.”
About Help4Access
Founded by Sasha Froyland, Help4Access has successfully completed more than 800 custom database applications to companies that range in size from large Fortune 500 to small start up companies in every industry. Help4Access has been in business since 1994, is a Microsoft Certified Partner with a focused dedication to delivering Microsoft Access solutions and is uniquely capable of offering exceptionally deep world-class database consulting services to their customers. Help4Access’s highly experienced business analysts and engineering team are able to automate back-office tasks and reduce or eliminate an organization’s dependency of siloed data trapped in Excel spreadsheets. Help4Access continues to operate under the founding principals of growing their business one successful customer at a time.
About SESIdw
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, SESIdw’s focused dedication to cloud computing, data warehousing, business intelligence and system integration allows the company to offer exceptionally deep world-class consulting services to their clients. SESIdw utilizes only the best-of-breed partners including Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Tableau, Citrix, Sybase IQ, SAP, Business Objects, Informatica and Oracle. Specialization enables SESIdw to offer proven, innovative, custom technical solutions to their clients from the initial concept through implementation.
