BIX Tech

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a systems analyst and PO at SALINOR. We are the largest salt producer in Brazil with an average of 2.5 million tons of salt per year.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

BIX was hired to help us build Datasets and reports in PowerBI.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

The selection of suppliers was not made by me.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The project's objective is primarily the creation of datasets for the business areas, where some capable people can develop reports based on them. Second, but no less important, is the creation of reports on the main indicators of the business areas so that little by little we can automate the analyzes that are currently carried out in Excel. Already covered business areas are: Production, Finished Product Inventory (With some loss and return analysis), Human Resources and we are currently starting Supplies.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Initially there were 2 resources: Frank Figueiredo and Felipe José (BI Consultant). During the project, only Felipe continued to develop.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

In all the business areas we went through, errors were identified in the analyzes that were carried out or inconsistencies in the data. We can thus improve our collection and analysis process. In the production analyses, in addition to the significant improvement of the analyzes that were carried out, we were able to create new analyzes with information that were not even used. In this way we are managing to improve the production process.

In HR analyses, we were able to improve indicators and deliver them faster. New analyzes related to absenteeism and overtime were created. In the analysis of finished product inventory, we were able to improve our loss and return indicators. So far we estimate that 80 hours of work per month have been reduced.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We had a very good synergy. The consultant has great knowledge and helps us with various insights. The partnership is being very productive.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The consultant helps us find the best path for our data analysis. Sometimes, when he lacks knowledge about a certain subject, there are people who support him or he seeks to improve his knowledge in order to deliver the best possible results.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I believe that we can always improve in some aspect, but right now I can't point to anything. Whenever things are not going according to plan, we get together and align the points to be improved.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I work as a project manager at a startup (healthtech). Our drive is to promote transformations in healthcare’s access, management and payment, reshaping the hole care experience for companies, physicians, hospitals, industry and millions of patients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

There was a huge effort by one of our customers to monitor the activities of implementation and operation of the products offered (health care). This didn't allow the operation to take action in the necessary time. The arrangement and organization of data didn't allow the generation of updated views (BI's).

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

By indication.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The first action was to explore customer data to create indicators that would compose the BI's panels. Second: understanding of the client's entire operation and its business rules. Third: mapping these indicators to the FHIR standard to finally build the panels.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Three data analysts.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Highly positive feedbacks. Our client is now able to analyze structured data generated daily in D-1 in an automated way and with standardized indicators in FHIR (which favors interoperability, reuse, etc). Before, this analysis took about 4 days involving 2-3 teams.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

All meetings were remote and we used tools such as Jira, Google Meeting, Google Docs and Slack to maintain communication and project monitoring. The BIX team was always available and very engaged.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their commitment, engagement, and technical knowledge were impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There is always chance for improvement in any company. However, I'm very satisfied with BIX team. I don't think of anything that needs improvement by now.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Business Planning Analyst. Ceramic tile industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

We need to give visibility to the market data that was collected through the Involves tool. Until then, this data was processed in Excel, which required a lot of time for the team to be able to deliver the reports.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Bix is ​​already a partner company of the Portobello Group, for which it has already developed several successful projects that are a reference within the Group.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

First we understood the data, where it came from and what source we were connecting to. Having knowledge of the data, we defined which views would be prioritized so that the project could be validated with the area responsible for the application throughout the project. This project needs to be split into two main deliverables.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were three BI consultants.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were able to reduce the time spent in the process of building the views, speed in reading information, we were able to have different insights about the market, in addition to seeing more possibilities for developing new panels, where we can further explore this data.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Lucas and Vittorio were excellent professionals. Communication was very fluid with them, we are in contact all the time and whenever there was an obstacle in the project, we would meet to break the problem down. They were proactive professionals who suggested several solutions that made total sense to the project, they were not open to hearing our opinion about the views presented and adjusting whenever necessary. They were at all times extremely cordial, friendly and polite. I only have compliments for both of them.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The standard of care of BI analysts and their adaptability.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The company is meeting all expectations.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a business intelligence analyst in the ceramic tile industry. We produce more than 2 million m² of flooring per month.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

We had to implement an automated reviewing process over the P&L dashboards of all the group's business units (with visibility for the CEO and board of directors). ETL was already quite complex (with more than 6 thousand lines of code) and the calculated indicators had several business premises.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Vanessa (consultant at BIX Tecnologia) developed and implemented an elegant solution, without adding more complexities to the process. We now have a JavaScript extension to approve and trigger updates to Qlik Sense, associated with notifications sent with Nprinting.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Survey of needs, reverse engineering of the system already in production, PoC development, functional tests, validation, implementation in production, final adjustments, documentation.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

1 consultant

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Full function and well documentated system.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We mostly spoke remotely by video call.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The consultant was fearless and committed to delivering a fully functional solution.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing to improve by now, it was a perfectlly done job.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Intelbras is a Brazilian company founded in 1976, in the state of Santa Catarina. Manufacturer of products and solutions in Security, Communication, Networks and Energy, the company operates in image management, condominium centers, in the manufacture of electronic security products, switches and on the telephone. I am responsible for the administration of the company's data environments.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

We hired BIX to develop the BI for tracking and controlling calls.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Being BIX as one of the best BI consulting companies in the region and having in its previous work developed a similar BI.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The challenge was to capture all the information from a Dutch system using the Odata connection, transform this information following the premises and business rules and transform it into a visualization for quick analysis and management of the users of the app.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

1 Qlik developer consultant and 1 product manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Success was to achieve the expectations of end users on time and without scares.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

With regular meetings and holding a conversation group, there was good synergy between the teams.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The ability to absorb the user's need and transform it into the reading and development of the technical part requiring minimal internal support from the company

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

In this specific case, it would not change anything in terms of progress or development.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a FP&A analyst to a brazilian fashion company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. My position mainly goal is to provide accurated financial analysis, support management decisions.

Our portifolio is composed by premium brands, with +280 phisical stores throughout the Brazil and a on going expansion to USA/Europe. The company is about 5.000 employes.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

For the past 10 years company's managerial reports were consolidated and built in Excel files. Currently, due to the new standards and company size, it's became inefficient to work with spreadsheets as a data source. We felt the need to chance to something more secure and structured.

What were your goals for this project?

This project was intended to restructure a data warehouse desinged to automate consolidation routines in order to accelerate elaboration and provide consistency to financial reports.

SOLUTION

How did you select BIX Technology?

BIX Tecnology had already developed other successful projects within the company, mostly in partnership with our tecnology department. Having a positive background in house helped us decide, but, besides that, they had experience in this particular matter.

Describe the project in detail.

The scope was to gather information from different sources and combine them into a single strucctured data warehoure. There were three major building blocks: revenue, taxes and expenses.

To each of them a specific routine was designed and automate, going from just select a few columns to complex apportionment by brand/channel. After the rules were determined, the data warehouse with historical data was populate and the routines were set to run periodically.

What was the team composition?

The team was composed by a BIX senior consultant and myself.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The project was concluded on time. The data warehouse was build sucsssefully, integrating steps and routines that took approximately 12/16 hours per month of manual work within a couple hours of computational effort.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication flow was the best possible. The team had a check-in meeting every morning to discuss the workplan for that day. Whenever something went down not as planned, the team would get together again to make the adjustments needed.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The ability to understand and respect the client's needs, without making suggestions or trying to increase the scope so they can get a bigger project. I also like how they make every second available productive, which was essencial due to the busy period that the company was through.

Another factor that helped a lot was the proactive attitude the consultant took regarding information and validation, stepping in to other departments.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The schedule was a bit extensive to this particular goals. We agreed to an open schedule in the end, so there was no harm.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the systems coordinator at foundry headquartered in southern Brazil. Our company has about 1000 employees and we serve custom steel castings for clients all over the world.

I am responsible for overseeing the maintenance and development of our enterprise system and BI.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BIX Technology?

We are starting to leverage the features from a new version of our BI software that we recently acquired and we did not have any in-house engineers available due to recent downsizing.

With the increasing pressure for new resources and information to be made available in our BI platform, we decided to outsource the development for two analytic dashboards focused on cost data which was not easily accessible from our legacy system.

We were also looking for a company which would focus on training key users and do a proper knowledge transfer, so that the developments made were sustainable.

What were your goals for this project?

We aimed to have clear and well designed dashboards for logistics and maintenance costs so that we could develop better understanding of the cost behavior, look for cost reduction opportunities and develop a better know how for cost forecasting.We also wanted to train a team of internal analysts.

SOLUTION

How did you select BIX Technology?

We searched for potential BI partners and listed 3 candidates based on cases presented and feeedback from colleagues. We contacted each company and decided to go with BIX based on the quality of the cases presented, their willingness to properly train our staff and their price point, which we considered fair.

Also, they were very transparent on their proposal, which made us confident on their ability to deliver.

Describe the project in detail.

Once we selected Bix as our partner, we started with the project for a logistics costs dashboard, followed by the maintenance one.We had the additional challenge of our legacy system being custom made by a software house for more than a decade and being in constant development.

That meant having to deal with data structures and business rules that were not industry standard. We felt that Bix handled this situation very well.In both developments, we had a design phase, with constant input from the final user, followed by a development and feedback phase and finally de training and documentation.

What was the team composition?

We had project managers from both our company and Bix. Bix assigned one full time developer and we assigned one key user to each project. We also held meetings with our software developers or other users whenever needed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were able to pinpoint patterns for our logistic costs which were hurting our results and are in the process of reducing them. We estimate a 5% reduction based on data available. We are now better prepared to quote the freight costs to our customers, enabling our sales team to make more assertive decisions.

We are currently starting a project for 10% maintenance cost reduction based on the data we derived from the dashboard developed.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We had no communication issues with the Bix team and had frequent updates and discussions.Bix has a great method and structure for updates and feedback. We held semiweekly short and structured meetings for development report, user input and feedback and challenges discussion.

This was critical to the speed, quality and work delivered.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The visual aspects and overall flow of information in the final work is superb. We were also impressed with the level of documentation and support provided. We truly consider this to be above our expectation levels.

The quality and easy-of-use of the dashboards is top notch.Also, their commitment to making sure the data is right is really impressive. We were able to find and document several business rules which were not written anywhere, and also a few bugs in the system.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'm not sure whether I can really point to a measurable need for improvement. Sure everything can be done faster, but that might sacrifice quality, which is more important. Working with Bix was a delight.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

ASSEC is a self-managed Health Plan Operator registered at ANS with approximately 5,000 beneficiaries. I’ve been the president of ASSEC since 2018, with a mandate that goes till 2021.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with BIX Technology?

We were going through a delicate moment where the control of everything was very outdated. They were archaic and, in some cases, even manual. As soon as we assumed we had the purpose of bringing innovative technological change within the Operator, we were introduced to business intelligence (BI) and BIX Technology.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

BIX Technology got involved by presenting us with BI plans of strategy optimization, cost optimization, and fraud detection. They demonstrated how we could decrease our loss ratio, with a focus on and strict performance with our providers. Our other issues included accompanying patients’ high costs and identifying irregularities. BIX Technology guides and consults us by providing solutions to our problems.

What is the team composition?

We work with the operators responsible for the technical part. On the operational side, we do the work together to arrive at the expected results.

How did you come to work with BIX Technology?

We found BIX Technology, and they presented us with the OPME-DIGITAL tool which would facilitate our negotiations on the purchase of high-cost materials. The cost-benefit factors made us accept the challenge and choose to engage with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We invest about $6,000 per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing project started in May 2019. BIX Technology is our partner and gives us ongoing support.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The results are surprising, mainly in terms of cost reduction, response time for performance, and almost-instant auditing. We do short-, medium-, and long-term planning through annual diagnoses presented by BIX Technology.

How did BIX Technology perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was done in several "hands", with the objective of obtaining the best possible result. Communication was always clear and direct, and their team never exceeding the deadlines established. In the end, everything was accomplished within the contracted timeline.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Our partnership with BIX Technology is excellent. They’re involved and committed to finding a quick solution to our problems as well as identifying the best solution and putting customer satisfaction first.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We're an engine manufacturing company with a turnover of $2,050M and about 14,000 employees. I am a Senior Business Analyst, currently acting as Solution Owner of the Engineering and Procurement cluster.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with BIX Technology?

We started with the implementation of the Cost Deployment Algorithm using Qlik Sense. The objective was to have visibility of losses in the production lines.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Bix became involved as a partner in the strictest sense of the word. He got involved with the pains of our company with the clear objective of solving our problem, looking for solutions with a lot of resilience until reaching the goal.

What is the team composition?

They were involved from the CEO-level in understanding the project. Then it was passed on to the specialist and deployed with two other developers, all of them very committed to delivery.

How did you come to work with BIX Technology?

We were in the process of selecting companies to help us in the Business Intelligence journey. I've known them since college, and I've always had a lot of admiration for their work.

How much have you invested with them?

About Reais $150k. ($26,600.00 USD)

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in June 2018 and ended in December. It is an ongoing support collaboration.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The area really liked the solution. We managed to break the paradigm of Power BI being better / easier to use. The presentation and navigability were great, and we were awarded the most innovative company in Brazil in the Manufacturing category, ranking 3rd overall, by IT Forum in 2019.

How did BIX Technology perform from a project management standpoint?

They have very clear and objective communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their persistence in understanding the solution and not giving up until we reach the final result stands out.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There could be increased availability of direct contact with the developer.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an administrative manager at Emdagro Servers Association – ASSEM.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with BIX Technology?

The OPME DIGITAL tool was developed by BIX Technology, which was born with the aim of offering modern solutions for receiving quotes for Optoses, Prostheses and Special Materials (OPME), for health plan operators.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The company provided professionals to learn about the old process used by the Operator and start the development of the tool, using the Python programming language.

What is the team composition?

A group of three employees actively participated in the development of the project.

How did you come to work with BIX Technology?

We were already aware of other BIX Technology products. A search for solutions was carried out in the market and BIX presented the best solution—in less time and with the most accessible value.

How much have you invested with them?

The development of the project cost $5,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in April 2019 and ended in June 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

From the use of the tool, we were able to optimize the quotation process. We noticed an increase in competitiveness among suppliers, generating cost savings in the acquisition of materials and easier decision making. BIX has offered daily maintenance and support since the development of the project. They provide services quickly and offer practical solutions.

How did BIX Technology perform from a project management standpoint?

All the deadlines presented were fulfilled to our satisfaction. Online meetings were held and materials such as spreadsheets, copies of budgets, and supplier lists were sent via email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They presented a quick solution, with practicality and less cost for development.

Are there any areas they could improve?

None.