Medxcel is a leader in the transformation of healthcare facilities services, offering healthcare providers hospital facility operations management. As a company created by healthcare for healthcare, Medxcel offers a vast scope of services to enable its customers to deliver a higher standard of patient care.
“We think of ourselves as a one-stop-shop that provides everything from landscaping to fire and safety to facilities management,” says Jodi Wolfe, Director of Business Applications for Medxcel.
Data Governance Challenges
Like many organizations, the Medxcel team had stored much of their data in an enterprise data lake in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. With limited experience with data governance, data quality, or their new Power BI tool for visualizations, they wanted to use their data more strategically as a decision-making asset.
Executives had asked for access to real-time data insights through dashboards, even when they were away from the home office. It was important to begin making these insights available to business users overall, enabling them to make more confident decisions based on good quality data that they could access at any time.
Developing manual reports in Excel was time-consuming and exposed Medxcel to an increased risk of errors, and much of the data they needed was not yet stored in their data lake. It was also difficult to control the security of the data shared across various levels of the business, and there were no visuals available to help business users interpret data and identify meaningful insights.
“We had recently brought over a lot of data from our legacy company, and that data needed to be cleaned up,” says Wolfe, “but we needed to clearly outline who owned what data. Especially as we embarked on this new reporting platform, where folks were going to be able to publish data more easily, we wanted to make sure that we had the proper governance in place to ensure that everyone was receiving the right data from the right sources.”
With the adoption of the Azure cloud and Power BI visualization platform, the Medxcel team was charging down a path to make data more accessible and easier to publish to generate insight. They wanted to focus on improving data quality to ensure the data was trustworthy, how to establish who owned what data, and how to maintain data security given the newfound ease of sharing.
The Medxcel team decided to partner with Onebridge for two primary reasons:
- Our experience with Azure and Power BI to accelerate the creation of executive dashboards to enable valuable insight and drive immediate action.
- Our expertise around data governance, data quality, data warehouse architecture and data marts to ensure the reliability of data used to drive action.
Adopting Azure and Power BI to Make Data More Useful
Medxcel prioritized proper data governance, understanding that they needed to ensure the consistency and quality of their data so their overall data analytics efforts would succeed. Without proper data governance, any insights obtained couldn’t be relied upon to drive confident action and positive results for the business. Without anyone on the team with significant experience with data governance, they began looking for subject matter experts.
Rather than implementing a strategy without a full understanding of data governance, they prioritized building internal data governance literacy in addition to building skills with their new Azure and Power BI platforms.
“We wanted to accelerate the development of executive dashboards and also work shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to help them understand how to use these new tools,” says Wolfe.
It was important to make trustworthy dashboards available to the business to take their data usage to the next level.
Building Data Governance and Quality Literacy
As a result of the partnership with Onebridge, Medxcel has increased internal literacy around Azure, Power BI, data governance and data quality. We helped them to deliver executive dashboards using trusted data much more quickly than anticipated, and they now have the improved skills within the organization to mobilize their data governance knowledge, turning theory into practice. The gap between IS and the business has also been bridged, allowing teams to work in harmony toward the common goal: greater data insights to drive and grow the business.
“Being able to establish a partnership with Onebridge where we can flex different skills in and out as the work demands it has been very beneficial for us. The project leadership we’ve received from Onebridge has been very communicative and they’ve been very consistent in delivering,” says Wolfe. “They were able to come in and work closely with IS and the business to perform an assessment and help the organization get a baseline understanding of data governance and how to launch that within our organization. They very quickly established themselves as experts in the field of data governance and also in their technical experience of Power BI and data mart development.”
For more details, check out our recorded interview with Jodi here.
