Onebridge, a Microsoft partner based in Indianapolis, Indiana, offers industry-specific solutions spanning across data management, business intelligence, advanced analytics, and application development. Through its commitment to its employees and partners, Onebridge has established a history of success empowering good people to do great things.

Searching for data-based, decision-making solutions

Medxcel, a leader in the transformation of healthcare facilities services, helps healthcare providers manage hospital facility operations. As a company created by healthcare and for healthcare, Medxcel offers a vast scope of services to enable its customers to deliver a higher standard of patient care.

“We think of ourselves as a one-stop-shop that provides everything from landscaping, to fire and safety, to facilities management,” says Jodi Wolfe, Director of Business Applications for Medxcel.

Looking to grow and expand their business, Medxcel executives wanted to mature their data strategy to make more value-based decisions.

Like many organizations, the Medxcel team had stored much of their data in an enterprise data lake in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. With limited experience with data governance, data quality, or their new tool, Power BI for visualizations, they wanted to use their data more strategically as a decision-making asset.

Their goal was to provide executives and business decision makers with real-time data insights through intuitive dashboards that would be available even when away from the office. They knew it was important to make these insights readily available to business users in order to confidently make decisions based on quality data, in a timely manner.

Development of manual reports in Excel had proven time-consuming and exposed Medxcel to an increased risk of errors—and much of the data they needed was not yet stored in their data lake. They also found it difficult to control the security of the data shared across various levels of the business, and lacked meaningful visualizations to help business users interpret data and more quickly identify meaningful insights.

Onebridge implemented a solution at Medxcel that used an Azure cloud instance as the data warehouse which acted as the central hub for multiple data feeds integrated through ETL processes. These data feeds were cleansed, staged, and arranged in a schema which allowed for efficient consumption into Power BI. Dashboards were developed to service multiple departments such as executive, finance, supply chain, compliance, and facilities management.

Onebridge engaged with Medxcel through a Continuous Delivery (Managed Services) Data and Analytics contract, providing multiple resources with diverse skillsets and expertise in the Microsoft products involved, as well as a Client Service Manager. The project was managed through two-week agile sprints where Onebridge identified, developed, and implemented a series of tasks related to the overall strategic initiatives of the client and solution.

Using Azure and Power BI to unlock data potential

With the adoption of the Azure cloud and Power BI visualization platform, the Medxcel team has started down a path to make data more accessible and actionable. Onebridge continues to work with Mexxcel to constantly improve data quality and trustworthiness—helping establish data ownership and maintain data security given the newfound ease of sharing.

Medxcel prioritized proper data governance, understanding the need to ensure the consistency and quality of data so Medxcel’s overall data analytics efforts would succeed. Medxcel knew that without proper data governance, any insights obtained couldn’t be relied upon to drive confident action and positive results for the business. Lacking significant data governance experience in-house, Medxcel sought out subject matter experts at Onebridge to augment their team.

Rather than implementing a strategy without a full understanding of data governance, Medxcel prioritized building its internal data governance literacy and growing skills on its new Azure and Power BI platforms.

“We wanted to accelerate the development of executive dashboards and also work shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to help them understand how to use these new tools,” says Wolfe.

The implemented solution shortened time to insight from multiple days to hours for the executive leadership team. Onebridge and Medxcel continue to work together in order to improve how Medxcel uses data to make strategic business decisions while maintaining its data security posture.