Establishing Enterprise Analytics
A results-oriented Retail REIT with a national footprint and relentless growth strategy recognised the need to modernise its approach to data and analytics to achieve its strategic objectives of growth, operational efficiency and improved return on investment (ROI). By transforming its analytics capability, the company has been able to unlock better insights, enhance decision-making and build a foundation for future scalability.
The Opportunity
Although reporting was available, the business struggled to access curated, reliable data for analysis. Key pain points included:
- Inconsistent KPI reporting across the organisation
- Slow decision-making due to cumbersome legacy systems
- Limited flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs and scale
- Inability to support advanced analytics for future growth, such as predictive modelling and AI.
To realise it’s ambitious growth and efficiency aspirations, the company looked to transform its technology landscape into a foundation for innovation and success.
The Approach
1. Strategic Planning & Foundation Building
From the outset, the client had ambitious goals for unlocking the value of their organisational data. As a first step, Open Box worked with the client to establish effective governance and communication pathways, ensuring every decision was transparent and aligned to strategic priorities.
Through a series of collaborative workshops with over ten teams, Open Box, working with the client, explored high-level requirements and unique challenges in each area were uncovered. This inclusive approach built early stakeholder buy-in and provided a holistic view of reporting needs across the company.
The outcome was a consolidated, prioritised backlog of company-wide requirements and a detailed technical blueprint for the solution. Architecture options and tailored recommendations — aligned to strategy, operating environment and budget — enabled a well-informed and confident decision on the way forward.
Throughout this phase and beyond, engagement remained consistent and purposeful. In addition to regular project check-ins and reporting, Steering Committee sessions maintained executive alignment and ensured the project remained anchored to business objectives.
2. Iterative Development & Delivery
With the strategic groundwork established, the project transitioned into delivery with a clear, business-driven focus: improving the accessibility, usability and strategic value of organisational data.
Following selection of the preferred analytics platform, a hybrid agile model was applied, utilising two-week sprints with retrospectives and planning sessions. This methodology encouraged continuous improvement and early value delivery to stakeholders.
Quality assurance was emphasised throughout every stage, including rigorous development testing, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and regression testing to guarantee stability and performance. Consequently, each release was robust, reliable and ready for immediate deployment.
Acknowledging the importance of adoption, a multi-tiered training programme was introduced, featuring:
- General user training to enable widespread adoption throughout teams.
- Targeted training for business stakeholders to enhance decision-making effectiveness.
- Advanced training for Citizen Analysts to enable independent expansion and adaptation of reports, fostering long-term internal capability.
Open Box’s commitment extended beyond go-live, with continuous support to safeguard performance, encourage adoption and ensure the solution continues to serve as a scalable foundation for the client’s evolving analytics ambitions.
The Solution
The solution leveraged modern best-fit technologies to achieve the desired outcome for the business. This included the following key elements:
- Automated data sourcing and consolidation into a centralised Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) to ensure reliable, curated data for analysis.
- Integration of the legacy reporting application to maintain continuity while modernising the analytics landscape.
- Delivering data models and BI reports to streamline and accelerate access to critical data and insights.
- Self-service BI capabilities, empowering users to explore and analyse data independently.
- Implementation of modern technologies, including an advanced Enterprise Data Warehouse, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric and a suite of Azure services to support scalability, flexibility and future growth.
The Result
The business obtained an immediate and concise view into key metrics and were able to drilldown and segment data they previously had no insight into.
To highlight a few examples: Finance were able to interrogate Opex across their entire portfolio and analyse costs by lease type and other categories. Acquisitions could keep better abreast of contacts and communication frequency and format for follow-ups. Asset managers could dynamically view property budgets by region and state and compare actuals, forecasts and see variances through their preferred breakdown and time horizon. Development teams could track project costs, see summaries and estimated profit in one place.
This enhanced their operations and delivered the following strategic outcomes:
- Improved Efficiency: Reporting processes were streamlined, significantly reducing manual effort and freeing up teams to focus on higher-value, strategic work.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: Accurate and granular property cost analysis highlighted disparities and empowered leadership to make better financial decisions and allocate resources more effectively.
- Self-Service Empowerment: With self-service BI tools in place, employees across the business gained the ability to generate their own reports and insights without IT dependency, democratising access to insights across the organisation.
- Foundation for Future Growth: While continuing to leverage existing legacy reporting investments through integration, the delivered scalable architecture now supports the company’s long-term vision, including the potential adoption of advanced analytics, data science and AI.
- Executive Buy-In: The demonstrable value in delivery to the business secured approval and support from C-suite stakeholders to continue with additional use cases.
The Conclusion
This analytics transformation not only solved immediate challenges but also positioned the organisation for sustainable, data-driven growth. By balancing innovation with practicality, the project delivered measurable ROI, stronger decision-making capabilities and a future-proof foundation for continued success.
Delivering enterprise analytics that unlock smarter property decisions.
