Extracting Business Insights with Power BI for the Electrical Safety Authority

Background and Challenge Story

The Electrical Safety Authority (ESA)’s vision: An Ontario where people can live, work and play safe from electrical harm. ESA’s annual workload includes 500 000 on-site inspections, answering 600 000 calls, and interactions with 15 000 master electricians.

ESA’s commitment to safety requires them to analyze and review data sets from multiple internal and external sources. More recently, the data sets have become more plentiful, more complex, and more varied in the actual form of the data. Driven by their mandate and goals, ESA decided to rethink how they conducted analytics to better respond to the needs of their stakeholders, including audit and compliance requirements. The current solution included an aging data platform, augmented with manual processes and Excel-based reporting, and was no longer sufficient to deliver on the mission and goals.

Digging deeper into ESA’s data sets was becoming more time-consuming and laborious. The information needed to be manually integrated and often required additional data checks to ensure the validity and quality of the raw data. The current data environment and reporting solution were no longer meeting the needs of the organization, and data consumers and line managers required more flexibility to dig into the data and extract additional meaningful insights.

Why Zelusit?

ESA was searching for a strong data visualization partner to build its advanced analytics. Based on proven results and a strong RFP proposal that was right-sized for the company, ESA was eager to partner with Zelusit again for their current enterprise solution.

At Zelusit, BI is an end-to-end solution tailored to each organization’s unique data and reporting requirements. We pride ourselves on developing effective BI strategies to enable data democratization and data-driven decision-making within organizations.

Solution: Extracting Business Insights with Power BI

Every successful data modernization initiative and analytical environment improvement requires documenting the appropriate business requirements, definitions, and business rules.

ESA’s CIO, Kelley Irwin, knew that creating a secure and scalable data platform and combining the organization’s various data sources together to gather insights was a crucial step for ESA.

“As we implement online services capturing more data, we knew that success would require a robust data platform to empower analytic capabilities for data-driven decisions and business insights,”

explains Irwin.

Zelusit initiated the engagement with a complete discovery session and worked with ESA to map out data sources and data definitions and develop an enterprise model to become the heart of the new data environment.

Zelusit leveraged the Azure environment and functionality to quickly develop a proof of concept which was fundamental to the complete implementation of the solution.

Through the discovery session, the critical data sets were identified and mapped. By understanding the data definitions and profiling, Zelusit introduced a data quality step to improve the raw data’s validity and robustness.

The data was brought into the Azure data lake storage and then was modeled via the enterprise data model and loaded into the synapse layer. Data lineage and definitions ensured that the appropriate look-up and linkages could be made according to the enterprise model. At this point, the curated and cleansed files were integrated creating a curated data layer.

Zelusit implemented Microsoft’s Power BI as a reporting tool, putting the power of analytics in the hands of ESA’s analysts and data scientists. Power BI allowed ESA to customize the presentation of data for a better understanding of business information, resulting in more actionable insights.

Impact

• Increased efficiency
• Increased reporting capabilities
• Tailored data visualization
• Greater insight generation
• Improved data quality
• Ability to quickly respond to demands

The collaboration by the joint ESA and Zelusit team was key to the success of the project, leveraging the deep data expertise of Zelusit and the business expertise of the ESA team members. The solution has enabled data sets to be reviewed with increased efficiency and has improved ESA’s data quality. This, in turn, resulted in no longer needing to perform additional data checks before running analytics, saving effort, time, and money for ESA.

By implementing Power BI, ESA is now able to develop custom analytics dashboards to gain valuable insights into their organization, enabling them to better respond to internal and external stakeholder needs.

The solution met all of ESA’s requirements and has set them up to deliver on their organization’s mandate.

“Our platform integrates data for Wiring Risk, Finance, Licensing, Inspections, and Serious Electrical Incidents (SEI). Improved data modeling and curation of the data for Wiring Risk data increases our ability to anticipate, understand and prevent electrical-related harms,”

says Irwin.