How a 1,700 person engineering firm kept 400 weekly Power BI users on like for like reporting from day one of its move to IFS.
weekly Power BI users with like for like reporting at go live
days of post go live reporting gap avoided
customer worldwide on the new IFS Analytics tooling
The Challenge
A major engineering firm with 1,700 professionals was moving from Epicor to IFS in a phased, global rollout. Its data warehouse held the mission critical facts and dimensions behind its business, and 300 to 400 people relied on the Power BI reports built on it every week.
The legacy and IFS data structures did not line up. Epicor modules referenced each other without true integration, customer tables sat at different levels of detail, and combined legacy fields had to be split to fit how IFS separates projects and contracts. The team had mapped 65 to 70% of the structures, but standard timelines meant usable analytics would not arrive until 90 to 180 days after go live. For a firm running active deployments, six months without clean project data was not an option.
The Approach
The core philosophy was to bring the data to the users rather than force 400 professionals to learn a new reporting model overnight. Instead of slow, traditional extraction, Coredrive engineered a custom integration on brand new IFS Analytics tooling; the client became only the second customer worldwide to use it.
The Solution
- Phased, hybrid execution: existing projects continued on legacy processes while all new projects deployed directly into IFS, with exact like for like reporting required at go live.
- IFS Analytics extraction: raw operational data pulled from IFS through the new IFS Analytics tooling, bypassing the 90 to 180 day latency window.
- Open source data pipeline: Azure Parquet files for efficient columnar storage, with DuckDB and dbt handling querying and transformation, recreating the power of a premier cloud data warehouse without the enterprise software constraints.
- Dynamic mapping: legacy granularity and column mapping mismatches resolved in the pipeline, before the data ever reaches Power BI.
The Results
Business Continuity
400
weekly Power BI users shielded from system change at go live
Like for like reporting from day one
Future Ready Analytics
Self service reporting for a large contingent consulting workforce
A scalable platform ready to absorb new IFS capabilities as the project data track expands