Infoland PowerBI integration

Project description

The goal of the project is to create an insightful, standardized dashboard by the end of this semester in which the dashboard can be customized by and/or for every customer. This should be made in a way Infoland can set it up and get it running within a day.

Main question:
How can Infoland produce an insightful, standardized dashboard that can be easily customized by/for every customer?

Context

Infoland is a Dutch software company established in 1998 and has around 100 employees. With these employees they serve over 500 customers based in 25 different countries. Their main product is Zenya, a software platform with 4 different modules (Gerhard, z.d.). Zenya allows their clients to experience continuous improvement and maximize performances by giving insights in quality controls and risks.

However, a big part of utilizing management systems is presenting the data in an appropriate manner, giving companies a comprehensive overview of their strengths, weaknesses but also their threats and opportunities. Even though Zenya has implemented the function of dashboard creation in their system, they are still limited to the basic functionalities. This leads to a lower customer satisfaction, as the dashboards don’t provide needed insights.

Moreover, the creation of the dashboard using Zenya is a time-consuming process, which lacks usability. Therefore, SwapItUp will come up with a standardized dashboard prototype to improve the process and give the customers of Infoland more insights.

Results

Within this research, SwapItUp searched for an answer to the question: “How can Infoland produce an insightful, standardized dashboard that can be easily customized by/for every customer?”

During the last six months SwapItUp worked on a prototype template dashboard that can fulfill the role of an insightful and standardized dashboard for the customers of Infoland. The prototype template dashboard file that is delivered at the end of the project, can be used as an example for Infoland on how they can produce an insightful, standardized dashboard that can be easily customized for every customer. The customer can load in the template file and, after they filled in their credentials, the dashboards within the file will be filled with their static data from Zenya. The data that is coming from the fields that were customized within Zenya are already added to the data model in the template dashboard file. The customer is therefore able to, besides their static dashboards, manually add graphs and dashboards based on their dynamic data.

Methodology

The project members worked in sprints because of their agile way of working. Agile is a well-known group of software development practices used in the IT-sector and is mainly focused on the idea of continual planning, incremental delivery, and team collaboration. In this way, SwapItUp ensured to work incremental and iterative meaning that every sprint something new was researched or developed and delivered for review at the end of the sprint.

The research is done using the DOT framework. The framework contains of 5 different research strategies, these strategies then contain multiple methods to conduct the research . For an overview of the used methods per sub question see Appendix A Project plan, Research approach.

About the project group

We are a group of two ICT & Business students, one integrated security student, one industrial engineer and one applied mathematician.