Customer Solution Case Study
Law Firm Cuts Licensing Costs with SQL Database Business Intelligence Reporting
Overview
Country or Region: Australia
Industry: Professional Services
Customer Profile
Corrs Chambers Westgarth is a 169-year-old legal firm employing over 1,000 staff in four offices.
Business Situation
The firm wanted to make business intelligence analysis and reporting tools widely available, but the cost of purchasing many additional licences seemed prohibitive.
Solution
The firm built a proof of concept staff utilisation report using its installed Microsoft SQL Server 2008, with the addition of SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services. Reports were published across the company using Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Benefits
· Greatly reduced costs
· Easy-to-use reporting
· More widely available analysis
· More empowered staff / “Now we can make reporting analysis available to a much broader range of people at a minimal cost.”
Berys Amor, National Infrastructure and Applications Manager,
Corrs Chambers Westgarth
Corrs Chambers Westgarth is a leading Australian law firm, with offices in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The company had invested in a business intelligence (BI) system that generated critical performance reports for partners and managers. However, the licence cost for extending this system to the entire firm was expensive, so when the firm decided it wanted to make reports more widely accessible, it faced a cost issue. In late 2009, Dimension Data built a reporting applications proof of concept using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and its inbuilt integration, analysis and reporting tools. The proof of concept successfully replicated the existing BI report, and since it used technologies already available under an existing Enterprise Agreement, the solution was highly cost-effective. Following a successful demonstration, Corrs Chambers Westgarth decided to switch to a Microsoft SQL BI platform, and believes it will help empower staff to improve the firm’s performance.
Situation
Founded in 1841, Corrs Chambers Westgarth is one of Australia’s top-tier corporate law firms. It provides advice to corporate, financial and government clients in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The firm employs approximately 1,100 staff, including 600 lawyers and partners at offices in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
Corrs Chambers Westgarth has a reputation for being one of Australia’s most innovative and professional law firms. Its lawyers and support staff work closely across its national offices and the wider region to give clients crafted technical and commercial advice.
The firm’s ability to maintain its status is partly due to one of its key assets: its business intelligence (BI) technology. Over a number of years, Corrs Chambers Westgarth had deployed and built out a comprehensive BI platform based on the Cognos product set. This platform took data from the firm’s practice managements systems – which used Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – and generated a variety of interactive online reports for partners. This information helped partners determine key performance metrics such as staff utilisation, work in progress and team members’ billable hours.
Towards the end of 2009, Corrs Chambers Westgarth was looking to expand its use of BI. In particular, the firm wanted to extend reporting capabilities beyond just partners to include managers and other staff across its offices, while also helping them to tailor those reports to focus on metrics that might be important to them.
“There was no question about the quality and business value of the reports, but the cost of all those extra licences would have been prohibitive,” says Berys Amor, National Infrastructure and Applications Manager, Corrs Chambers Westgarth.
In addition, many staff members were not familiar with the Cognos PowerPlay interface. Staff found it difficult to use, which limited their ability to creatively analyse all the data available to them. To get around this problem, some staff asked their colleagues in the IT or finance department to create customised SQL queries to extract data from the practice management system. This created issues with the consistency and accuracy of company data.
“Staff would sometimes get different versions of the truth, depending on which tables they extracted data from and how well they understood the way the information was structured in the system,” says Amor.
Solution
In November 2009, Corrs Chambers Westgarth engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Dimension Data to build a proof of concept.
“Our objective was to see if we could replicate the existing functionality using technology we knew would be much cheaper,” says Rolf Tesmer, National Consulting Team Lead, Database Services, Dimension Data.
Several factors made Microsoft the preferred choice. First, the firm already used a Microsoft SQL database for its practice management system, which meant that a Microsoft reporting tool would be relatively easy to integrate.
Secondly, Corrs Chambers Westgarth had signed an enterprise agreement with Microsoft earlier in the year, which included Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The requisite data integration, analysis and reporting tools were therefore available at no additional cost.
Lastly, although the firm did not yet use SharePoint, Dimension Data spotted an opportunity to use it to make reports more accessible.
“The latest version – SharePoint 2010 – has the ability to fully integrate some very advanced reporting tools,” says Tesmer. “We could configure the report in SharePoint so that it was usable by staff familiar Cognos.”
Publication through SharePoint would enable Corrs Chambers Westgarth to make reports easily accessible to everyone in the firm while at the same time maintaining strict access control where required.
It took Dimension Data three weeks to build the proof of concept. Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services sourced data from the practice management system and financial applications. The proof of concept included Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, which is a tool that translates technical views of data in rows and columns into more accessible, three-dimensional representations. It is also interactive, so that information can be sliced and diced according to the precise data runs the user is trying to analyse.
The proof of concept also included Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, which staff used to create reports before publishing them on a document sharing tool.
“We used SharePoint to create a portal that staff could use to access reports and dashboards,” says Mark Miller, General Manager, Applications Integration, Dimension Data.
On completion, the proof of concept was demonstrated to key stakeholders who were impressed by what they saw. Corrs Chambers Westgarth and Dimension Data agreed to migrate all the firm’s BI requirements to the Microsoft platform. Work will begin on HR reporting later in the 2010.
Benefits
By moving to a BI platform that integrates advanced Microsoft integration, analysis and reporting tools, Corrs Chambers Westgarth will cut costs, and provide staff with more powerful performance data.
Saving money
For Corrs Chambers Westgarth, the principal benefit of moving from the Cognos BI platform to one based on Microsoft SQL Server is a significant saving on client licences.
“When we signed a new enterprise agreement with Microsoft in July 2009, it included access to all those Microsoft technologies, so now we can make reporting analysis available to a much broader range of people at a minimal cost,” said Amor.
Extending business intelligence
Critically, the firm can be confident that staff will actually use BI, rather than just gaining an important but overly complex capability.
“It’s actually the same capability as before, but it’s just easier to use,” says Amor. “Down the track, staff will be able to mine the data more easily than they could, even if we had paid for them to have access to Cognos.”
Empowering staff
As a result, Corrs Chambers Westgarth can ultimately deliver on its secondary objective, which is to help its staff be more effective.
“This is about delivering business intelligence capabilities to more people, so that they can take the initiative themselves,” says Amor. “For example, teams won’t be dependent on getting data from the finance department, with the danger that they start using and circulating different versions of the truth.”
“Every team will have improved visibility on staff utilisation and budgeting and what’s going on inside the firm. We can be more informed about how the company works at a granular level, which will lead to more accurate and effective management.”
Helping the company to evolve
Because data cubes are relatively easy for staff to use, and because they can readily use that data in Excel or publish reports through SharePoint, information will become more important to staff and more powerful as an instrument of change.
The firm has already created a series of focus groups, canvassing different business units on ways they may be able to use business intelligence and reporting.
“Once we’ve finished migrating our existing reports to the new platform, there will be so many ways we can start mining the data,” says Amor.
“For example, it will enhance the way we do marketing, because we will have the capability to do more in-depth profitability analysis. We will be able to calculate our return on investment for marketing activities far more accurately.”
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