Dufrain helps Ultimate Finance with improving its reporting

IT consultancy Dufrain has designed and delivered a data warehouse platform for a client specialising in SME finance. Data is at the heart of Ultimate Finance’s operations, and the new data warehouse has enabled to organisation to gain greater insight into its business, and make more informed decisions.

Headquartered in the UK, Dufrain is a professional services firm specialising in data management, business intelligence and analytics. Since 2010, the company has worked to support customers around the world harness their data, gain valuable insights and make better informed decisions.

Recently, Dufrain was engaged by its client Ultimate Finance to build a new, scalable platform to deal with the future state of data in the organisation.

A specialist asset-based lender supporting the ambition of businesses, Ultimate Finance has been giving accessible funding to the UK’s SMEs since 2001, working with the British Business Bank to increase funding to small businesses and aid their understanding of the options available to them beyond their high street bank. At the heart of Ultimate Finance’s processes are reams of data, which have been generated over many years, by various legacy and third-party systems.

This has left the data plagued by teething issues of quality, harmonisation, integrity, completeness and consistency. Due to this, the business faced significant challenges and risk in deriving any decision.

The Ultimate Finance CIO decided to address these issues and more, in order to make the organisation a truly data driven business. According to the firm’s website, Dufrain was initially engaged for a data capability assessment and guidance regarding a solution that would align with the overall company’s strategy. The assessment eventually revealed the need for implementation of a data warehouse, something which Ultimate Finance then tasked Dufrain with designing and delivering.

A data warehouse is a large collection of business data used to help an organisation make decisions. The concept of the data warehouse has existed since the 1980s, when it was developed to help transition data from merely powering operations to fuelling decision support systems that reveal business intelligence. Dufrain’s team of consultants subsequently collaborated with Ultimate Finance’s management, IT teams, business analysts and stakeholders to oversee the creation of an Azure hosted data warehouse.

A phased agile approach using Dufrain’s standard delivery templates was proposed and adopted, which also enabled the client to validate and track progress at regular intervals. The resulting platform was resilient and scalable to cater future state of data in the organisation, paving the way for shaping the new data capability into a self-served reporting solution, thereby reducing resource dependency. It also addressed various challenges relating to performance, data quality, data integration and modelling for management information and analytics.

Commenting on the outcome, the client stated, “The Dufrain team has transformed our reporting environment, making it easy to navigate and use. Our data is now complete and of a high quality; which means we can gain a greater insight into our business and make more informed decisions.”