Project: Amerant Bank

Assisting a mid-size bank unify its report platform under Power BI On-premises Report Server (RS)

This project involved bizDecode developing reports under Power BI on-premises report server (RS). Power BI on-premises, also known as Power BI Report Server, is an alternative for companies who do not feel comfortable hosting their information on Azure yet.

This project involved transferring Excel, ClickView, and other BI technologies to Power BI. As part of our role, our BI Developer team listened to the requirements of the bank’s different departments: Finance, Credit Risk, Operational Risk, Trust, and Wealth Management, and worked with them and Information Technology to transform business needs into changes to data repositories (EDW & DataMarts) to prepare data for report development.

Within a new organization, we faced the challenge of unifying the work of BI developers. This required standardizing the report’s backend and front end. The process begins with our web artist, who designs the report’s front pages and sets the rules to build visuals according to the corporate presentation policies. It is the designer’s responsibility to define the color palettes for Power BI desktop applications in a JSON file so that color selection and basic visual rules can be simplified.

The second step is to identify which parts of the report’s backend can be standardized and place the Dax code in a project SharePoint site for all developers to access. By unifying the naming conventions for tables and fields, following IT standards, any developer can comprehend another’s reports as needed. This standardization not only makes upgrading and maintenance the reports easier but also minimizes future upgrade cost and improve performance.

An essential requirement for a reliable reporting platform is for the IT team to turn all customer requests into a formal procedure that can be incorporated into the bank’s ETL routine. Connecting reports to excel tables which are updated manually can only be an interim solution, and our team must remain in contact with IT until they have created all the required tables and upload them to a structure repository. If data cannot be automated by the ETL unit due to it not being available in a structured repository, then it may be necessary to create a desktop or mobile application to ensure its correct capture, transformation and load to the structure repositories.

During this project, we transferred about 50 major management and regulatory reports within very tight deadlines, within budget, without rotating employees. There were no complaints and a large number of satisfied customers.