Four disconnected systems, monthly reporting that consumed three days, and no visibility into project profitability. We built the data platform and delivered dashboards in 10 weeks.
A 500-person management consulting firm was operating its business across four systems with no integration layer: Salesforce for pipeline and client management, BambooHR for headcount and utilization data, a legacy SQL Server database for historical project financials, and a project management platform for current engagement tracking. The firm's monthly reporting process required a finance analyst to spend three days manually pulling and reconciling data from all four systems into a master Excel workbook.
The firm's managing partners had no real-time visibility into project profitability, consultant utilization, or pipeline conversion. Profitability reviews happened quarterly and were based on data that was 30 to 90 days stale. The COO had been trying to address this for two years through internal IT, without success. The engagement came to Ingress after a board advisor recommended getting an outside team to scope and deliver it.
A professional services firm's most important operating metrics, utilization, realization, and project profitability by client and practice area, all live inside data that was scattered across four systems with no agreed definitions and no integration. The monthly reporting process was fragile: the Excel workbook had grown to 40+ tabs, was maintained by one person, and had broken twice in the prior year when that analyst was out.
The deeper problem was that without timely data, the managing partners were making staffing and pricing decisions on instinct. When the COO asked which practice area was most profitable, the answer required three days of work to produce. By the time the answer arrived, the relevant decisions had already been made without it.
The first week was not engineering work. It was semantic work: getting the COO, CFO, and managing partners to agree on canonical definitions for utilization, realization, and project margin before a line of SQL was written. Definitions that were ambiguous upstream caused the Excel reconciliation problem downstream.
The platform went live in 10 weeks from kickoff. The three-day monthly reporting cycle was eliminated on day one of production. The finance analyst who previously owned the Excel reconciliation process now spends that time on analysis rather than data wrangling. Monthly reporting is now a 30-minute review of a live dashboard rather than a three-day manual process.
Partner profitability reviews moved from quarterly to weekly. The COO now has a live view of utilization, margin, and pipeline that refreshes overnight. In the first month after go-live, the managing partners identified a practice area running at below-target margin that had not been visible in the quarterly review cadence, and made a pricing adjustment. The data platform paid for itself within the first operating quarter. The internal team owns and operates the platform without Ingress involvement.
Monthly reporting now runs as an automated overnight refresh. The 40-tab Excel workbook was decommissioned on the final day of the engagement.
The COO has a live utilization and margin view refreshed daily. Profitability gaps that were invisible in quarterly reviews are now surfaced within days.
Discovery through live dashboards in 10 weeks on a fixed-scope engagement. Internal team trained and operating independently. No Ingress dependency.
A below-target-margin practice area identified in week two of live data led to a pricing adjustment that offset the platform investment within one quarter.
Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold). Snowflake on AWS with Fivetran for SaaS connectors and custom Python for the legacy SQL Server integration.
dbt Core for all transformations with automated documentation, column-level lineage, and data quality tests. Full lineage from source column to dashboard metric for every number in every report.
Four Power BI dashboards live-connected to Snowflake: Partner, Pipeline, Ops, and Finance views. Daily automated refresh. Delivered to 45 active users across the firm.
How Ingress works with growing companies on cloud, data, and AI delivery. Scoped engagements. Senior practitioners. Written briefs before any commitment.
Data platform builds, BI delivery, and AI analytics. Snowflake, dbt, Power BI, Looker, and Databricks across industries and company sizes.
Federal, financial services, healthcare, defense, and mid-market delivery records across cloud, data, AI, and staffing programs.
Tell us what you're trying to see and what systems your data lives in. We return with a written scope, technology recommendation, and cost range before any commitment. Fixed-scope engagements only.