Analytics as a Service Case Study

Industry: Education
Location: Georgia

About the client:

Founded in 1871, the Fulton County School System is one of the oldest and largest school districts in Georgia. With a focus on student achievement and a commitment to continual improvement, Fulton has earned a reputation as a premier school system. This long history of excellence is evidenced by the many state and national honors bestowed on Fulton’s schools, staff and students.

The Fulton County School System is one of the most unique school systems in the nation. Though not Georgia’s largest school system in terms of student enrollment, it is, however, one of the largest systems in geographic area. From its southern end in the City of Chattahoochee Hills to its northernmost tip in Johns Creek, the county is more than 70 miles long. What is known as present-day Fulton County was formed by the 1932 consolidation of the former Campbell and Milton counties, making Fulton the size of three counties.

Any data, anywhere, any time

Power BI is a cloud-based analytics service that gives businesses a single view of your most critical decision support data in a format that is intuitive to consume. Power BI allows you to monitor the health of your business using a live dashboard, create rich interactive reports and access data remote with native Power BI Mobile apps.

Boost collaboration

• Robust tools for scheduling, time and task management, and resource assignments help you optimize project plans to deliver better results.
• Enables teams to collaborate on Dashboards, Reports, and Datasets. Power BI’s collaboration capabilities leverages Office 365 Groups that provide a central location for teams to work together. You only need a Power BI Pro license for this functionality, no additional licenses are required.

View Excel Reports in PBI

You can now view those pixel perfect Excel Reports directly from Power BI, exactly as you would in Excel Online .

BUSINESS PROBLEM

• Principals and other administrators expend considerable time and effort in collecting CCRPI data
• Additional effort is needed to consolidate data and present it in a fashion that is presentable to stakeholders and easily demonstrate status and improves decision making
• Additional disparate data and integration issues delayed the reporting
• A successful solution would reduce time, and effort. The solution will also deliver new, more timely generated information in a dashboard format that would lead to improved decision making

SOLUTION

• Aptude build Power BI dashboards that provided the school and district administrators with enhanced information on CCRPI and support data driven decision making
• Power BI dashboards were further developed for all performance components for a particular school district based on enhanced business requirements.
• The dashboards also provided historical data from 2012 to present

• The final data mart for these dashboards is a SQL Server 2012 db where the data is consolidated and eventually served to Power BI
• Developed the model for CCRPI required fields using a SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 (SSAS)
• Utilizing a SSAS model as the data source Power BI dashboards are developed ensuring that only school principals and the administrators can access the dashboards
• Security is provided using Power BI gateways for the User groups who will access the dashboards
• The dashboards have rich interactive features and are mobile device friendly
• Filters are available for the users to do Slice and dice of data to any extent
• The dashboards were developed in such a way they can be exported in multiple ways