CRU is a leader in commodity market analysis, providing unrivalled business intelligence on global metals, mining and fertilizer industries. The company transformed from a paper-based publisher to a digital operation, making increasingly data-driven analysis available from its website through subscription.
Challenge
As part of its digital transformation, the company looked to move away from SQL Server reporting services. They wanted to make the data available as a ‘single source of truth’ to finance and sales. The departments were reporting numbers independently, and it was difficult identifying the ones that were accurate. As well as squeezing efficiencies out of back office functions, there was also an opportunity to use a sophisticated analytics platform to help with market analysis for clients.
Solution
The company chose UBS because of easy integration with its Microsoft stack and the combination of features and price. It started with the Office BI product, but not before considering Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. A leading commodity market analysis company uses data across its global business to increase efficiencies and grow revenue UEB Toolsets Fine-Tune CRU’s Data-Driven Business Key Figures for proactive decision making.
It gives them visibility very quickly and data in a usable form that is actionable. It has helped with their revenue growth. Date governance and data management piece, which was very important to us,” Will Blake said. “With UBS, we can build dashboards centrally and push them out to users, who have some self-service, but it’s still controlled.” CRU took advantage of UBS increasing support for cloud and hybrid environments, particularly the tight integration with Microsoft Azure. Faster access to data makes the business more proactive than reactive. At CRU, UBS allows all the data residing in databases to be much more accessible justifying to better data governance.
The main goal is to create consistency in numbers across the business, while giving different business units dashboards to dig down into data for their own analysis. A big win for the sales team is how UBS’ automation of data makes it easier to track customer subscriptions. Previously it was a manual process, reliant on each salesperson logging in to see when one of their customers was up for renewal. Now it’s automatically updated every hour.
With UBS Analytics, CRU has:
- Improved business decision-making through more timely insights
- Filled gaps in revenue caused by lack of visibility
- Achieved better data governance and the balance between self-service and control
- Advanced a cloud strategy with a platform that supports hybrid environments