FSG SMART BUILDINGS Uses Rittman Analytics TO Transform Facility Management with Advanced Analytics
TECHNOLOGIES USED
Adam Haynes,
Chief Product Officer - Head of Product & Development
“Rittman Analytics was able to do what seemed impossible. With only hours of spin-up they dove head-first into the work with our team at FSG.
THEIR incredible team brought structure and strategy to the newly developing discipline of data analytics within FSG. When THEY joined, we were 6 weeks late on our internal timelines BUT within weeks, they were able to make up for the lost time and more”
VITAL STATS
Website:
http://fsg.com/
Industry:
Commercial Electrical Construction & Service, Lighting & Electrical Distribution, Energy Management
Company size:
2500+ employees
Headquarters:
Austin, Texas
RITTMAN ANALYTICS SERVICES
Data Centralisation
Embeddable Consulting
Data Enablement
dbt Consulting & Support
THE DOWNLOAD
Facility Solutions Group (FSG) is a leading provider of lighting, electrical, and energy management products and services, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Founded in 1982, FSG has grown to become a top 20 electrical contractor in the United States, with six divisions, 42 branches, four regional distribution centers, and 2,300 employees serving customers across all 50 states, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
Their divisions include Construction, Lighting, Electrical, Technology, Signs and FSG's Smart Buildings division, established in 1998, that focuses on leveraging technology to optimize building operations and energy management.
MAKING DATA ACTIONABLE AND EASY TO CONSUME
In line with their commitment to innovation and service excellence, FSG had embarked on a Smart Buildings initiative with the objective of leveraging data to optimize their operations and provide superior services to their clients.
Until now, FSG clients and in-particular those in the convenience store sector had needed skills with spreadsheets and data extracts to be able to act upon the data provided by FSG. Moreover, this data was fragmented and limited their clients’ ability to gain a holistic view of business operations, tenant behavior, and financial performance.
FSG’s team had been directed to make the data they collected and generated more actionable and easier to consume for their clients, and a key aspect of this initiative was the development of a Proof of Concept (POC) for surfacing key performance indicators (KPIs) and reporting tables in their client-facing application.
FSG faced several challenges in this endeavour, including a lack of initial experience with new tools, a need to innovate quickly, a desire for perfection, an absence of a roadmap or procedures for the team, the need to ensure data quality and bug-free releases, tool overload, and poor development experience due to team silos.
Embeddable, a powerful embedded analytics platform designed to integrate seamlessly into applications, had been selected as one of the key enabling technologies for this initiative.
As one of the founding members of the Embeddable Partner Program, Rittman Analytics were engaged by FSG to lead the technical implementation of Embeddable and guide FSG’s team through the process of delivering these embedded application analytics.
Project Objectives and Deliverables
Make Data Actionable: Improve the usability of data for a pilot FSG client
KPI Tracking: Provide valuable KPI tracking and more frequent updates.
Trusted Data Pipeline: Create a scalable, reliable, and trusted data pipeline.
Implement Embeddable : Implementation and skills transfer
ABOUT EMBEDDABLE
Embeddable is a powerful embedded analytics platform designed to integrate seamlessly into applications, providing robust data visualization and reporting capabilities. The platform allows users to create bespoke interactive dashboards and reports using a headless approach that gives teams full control over their UX and UI. Embeddable's key features include:
No-code Dashboard builder: Users can easily create and customize dashboards to meet specific business needs, without the need for coding or IT support
Native feeling: Data visualisation components that can be defined and edited in code to adopt the exact same “look-and-feel” as your customer-facing application, and load natively within the application’s DOM.
Scalability and Integration: Connects to most popular database and cloud data warehouse platforms with an embedded business semantic layer
TECHNICAL SOLUTION
The technical solution involved creating Embeddable KPIs that were initially placeholder measures that could be surfaced in advance of their specific business logic being agreed.
These placeholder KPIs could then be embedded in a prototype version of the customer-facing application so that all necessary KPIs were available before any client design workshops.
Once design was complete, business logic was added to each of the placeholder KPIs followed by user acceptance testing to ensure their accuracy and usability.
Rittman Analytics collaborated with Embeddable to gather and confirm requirements for the various KPIs and define a development roadmap for integrating Embeddable technology into FSG’s client-facing application.
FSG and Rittman Analytics’ teams worked-collaboratively to model and warehouse FSG’s high-volume smart buildings event data and define a rich, descriptive business semantic layer over the warehoused data.
Finally and after conducting thorough testing to ensure KPI accuracy and usability, FSG’s data pipeline was then orchestrated and scheduled using Dagster Cloud so that client data could be up-to-date as possible, ensuring that decisions would always be made on up-to-date buildings data.
OUTCOMES DELIVERED
Rittman Analytics played a crucial role in not only implementing the technical solution but also in guiding FSG through the process.
The project significantly improved the way FSG's clients interact with the data provided, making it more accessible and actionable. Rittman Analytics’ team were also able to lower the cost of operations down for FSG by employing advance data transformations, partitioning and by taking advantage of all the features offered by BigQuery.
The integration of disparate data systems provided a holistic view of business operations, tenant behavior, and financial performance, enhancing operational efficiency and enabling more effective buildings management.
