A governed reporting pipeline and Power BI dashboards that gave Parliament trusted, timely point-of-sale insight to manage its catering division.
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics
Microsoft
Delivery partner
Practice
In many organisations data sits in a vacuum, and in government the process to request access to it can be especially involved. South African Parliament wanted to base decisions on reliable, accurately processed operational information, and specifically to track and monitor point-of-sale performance in its catering division so it could act early when something needed correcting.
Working to a rigorous, waterfall-based methodology, the first risk to clear was getting system-level authorisation and access to the data. We then built an ETL pipeline that extracts point-of-sale and ERP data from Oracle sources, transforms and cleanses it, and loads it into a data mart in a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, with stored procedures running the analytics. That meant translating a lot of legacy Oracle scripts into MS SQL while keeping the calculations identical, and building a tabular data model in SQL Server Analysis Services. Power BI sits on top as a friendly dashboarding layer, built to the stakeholders’ requirements.
Parliament’s catering division now gets trusted data quickly and easily, without the long trip through bureaucratic channels to access it. Better decisions get made at the right time, the division is easier to manage, and reliable data availability is the kind of thing that helps government improve quality of service.
Similar work in Public Sector & Society
Transnet
First Digital took Transnet from an honest read of its digital maturity to an executive-aligned transformation roadmap, then helped embed it with targeted skills and change programmes.
Practice
Digital Transformation Strategy
Multiple public sector clients
Our First Campus Zero to AI Copilot Hero programme, run with Microsoft, took public sector teams from AI fundamentals to confidently using Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot and their own agents, with a managed-service follow-up so the adoption stuck.
Practice
Copilot Adoption & Enablement
US Local Government
We reviewed a US local government’s in-house development practices and helped them stand up a secure software development lifecycle, so the team writing their public-facing applications builds security in from the first requirement rather than bolting it on later.
Practice
Secure Development & SDLC
Get in touch
Send us the gist of what you are trying to do. The right person from First Digital will be in touch within a working day.
