Trading Up Reporting Standards

 What was the problem? 

The Trading Standards department required some guidance in upgrading their reporting system. 

The existing process was quite arduous – it required Trading Standards employees to do a lot of manual work. A lot of the work required was very repetitive, and so employees needed to dedicate a lot of time to create reports.  

Trading Standards wanted to upgrade their reporting service to Power BI to increase the automation and interactivity of their reports. 

What did we do? 

Working with Peak Indicators and the Trading Standards team we established their major pain points with the current form of reporting. 

One of the key aims of this engagement was to enable the Trading Standards team in utilising a user-experience (UX) focused process. Peak Indicators ran UX workshops to enable the team, and make sure they were creating dashboards that will provide maximum insights for the end-users.  This enablement means that this activity will be repeatable internally for Trading Standards for any design-based project going forwards. 

During the UX workshops, it was established that management teams were the target audience for the first interactive dashboard. The dashboard needed to be both interactive and high value, designed in a way that could be most accessible to a non-data literate audience. 

The next aim was to build some interactive dashboards in Power BI. We took a partnership approach to this, working with and enabling the Trading Standards team members in utilising Power BI to its fullest extent. 

The final aim was that the solution needed to automate the manual data tasks that were in place. The use of Power BI enabled the Peak Indicators and Devon County Council team to overcome this challenge. 

As there was an enablement focus – a Wednesday “Surgery” was introduced where Peak Indicators make a Microsoft Specialist available to Trading Standards. They can ask any questions around Power BI, which will sustainably increase adoption due to increased organisational knowledge. 

Results 

This was a revolutionary result for the Trading Standards team, as it is the first time that they can present data around complaints “pending allocation”. The dashboards were interactive and easily presentable to the management team. 

The Trading Standards team are now enabled in using Power BI, as well as the UX design process. This means the team can repeat these techniques for further projects. 

The solution has removed a long, arduous process, and has introduced an automated one. The result of this project means that the Trading Standards team can now allocate more time to value-generating tasks, rather than data administration. 

Due to the automated processes, the tasks are standardised – which in turn increases accuracy of data being reported. 

What did the client say? 

This feels like quite a revolutionary moment… In Power BI I was able to take an overview of all complaints on the entire database and drill all the way down to the last update recorded in the action diary of any single complaint in seconds, which makes me very happy”.