New regulations, like GDPR, for example, can be a huge pain in the bum for BI groups who have to do a lot of dirty work in order to ensure compliance across the organization.
The BI Manager at a large insurance company we work with told us about what happened to his team a while back when they were up against changing regulations. In order to comply, they had to make changes to HR headcount calculations, specifically they had to alter them from monthly to daily. Easy enough, right?
Not exactly. In order to tackle this, the BI group had to locate the formula calculating the headcount in all reports, database tables, ETL processes, views and stored procedures across different platforms, and determine the impact of the change. But with metadata scattered all over the place, it was hard to even know where to begin.
The BI group had to manually trace the data journey by mapping out all fields, processes and connections in order to discover each and every single location of the specific calculation that needed to be altered. This was super time consuming and ended up costing the company a lot of money as they were a large team fully dedicated to this project for at least a few weeks.
“Usually it’s hard to know where to find this calculation, the impact of changing it, and how much time is needed to complete this task. Before we started using Octopai, metadata was scattered all over the place and it was extremely difficult to find everything that needed to be changed and to know which specific reports were being influenced by the calculations.”
With Octopai, we can fix problems of this type almost immediately. We don’t have to waste time and resources manually mapping out the data journey anymore. Octopai centralizes all metadata from across multi-vendor systems in one place.
“The mapping process is very quick and easy. It does not involve any business disruption or production issues. With a single click, you get a detailed visual map showing where this calculation is being made, in every system, including its sub modules all the way to the raw line level.
“Thanks to Octopai, searching is simple and the results are extremely accurate. Our entire BI group has been totally empowered by Octopai automation.”
