/ Case Studies / User-Friendly Customer Data Portal for Global Industrial Distributor Case Studies User-Friendly Customer Data Portal for Global Industrial DistributorAn industrial supplies company required a new data platform to share internal information externally in a user-friendly manner. The Concurrency team developed a Power BI solution embedded in a web platform, allowing customers to conduct standard and custom reporting and providing value-driven metrics to enhance customer engagement. The platform also featured improved contact information and has been successfully utilized by the client’s sales team at trade shows to attract more customers.OverviewOur client, an industrial supplies company, needed a new data platform to be able to share internal information externally in a user-friendly way. To do so, our client needed to create templates and themes for common reports for better consistency and efficiency.The organization had a number of digital data elements such as sales numbers, invoices, shipment reports, location tracking, financial data, and more that needed to be communicated when servicing their own clients and providing goods. It had frequent touch points and interaction between their clients when sharing sensitive information, insights, and visualizations.In the existing system, employees generated countless reports between many people and between many teams on a regular basis—sometimes daily, monthly, or yearly—and also looked at trends throughout these periods. This was time consuming and burdened the team to do extra work that could be streamlined. While they had a common story or portal, these mostly centered around Excel.All these existing systems handled part of the need, but none did so fully or well. The need was for a more comprehensive way to provide information to customers—to create a “stickier” system that would engage customers in ways that made them all the more likely to keep doing business with our client.SolutionThe Concurrency team met with the client to discuss specific needs and create an action plan to begin the development of the platform. To begin, we started by creating a full-working demo for their employees. We developed a Power BI primary solution that was embedded in a web platform. This customer web portal allowed the client’s customers to log in and conduct standard reporting and occasionally custom reporting through Power BI. The reporting was branded and had a framework created by the client that was specific to their company.We were also tasked with creating a platform on the back-end that could share specific and detailed data with particular customers. We built a web application that had Power BI serving as a heavy integrator. This appeared on the client-side as an embedded report and a seamless user experience when jumping between reports.A unique feature we developed was a higher-level idea to show value about what our client was selling to their customers. This system provided value-driven metrics to the customer to reiterate and confirm the ways that they were providing value. The system better allows our customer to be more responsive, have data that is always available and accessible, allows for less human interaction to save time, and increases transparency.Also included in this new platform was better available contact information. We reorganized and changed the way this data was displayed and searched for, therefore allowing the client’s customers a better layout for showing who the sales representatives were, their areas, and how to contact them.Since delivery, the client has taken the demo and used it at trade shows to solicit their own potential customers. The sales team is now obtaining more customers, populating more data, neatly displaying data, and leveraging the technology in many ways.