Business Intelligence with Confluence

Solution and methodology

Using Confluence as a documentation and communication tool, building a permission management system and integrating business intelligence features into Confluence. Together with Fath24, all relevant requirements were first agreed on in a workshop, with attention to the specifics of Confluence and PocketQuery as a BI tool.

Products used

Atlassian Confluence Data Center, Refined for Confluence, PocketQuery, EasyMind, LanguageManager, Translations for Confluence, Advanced Image Gallery, Space Privacy – Extranet for Confluence, Table Filter and Charts for Confluence

Fath is a mid-sized corporate group from Spalt in Franconia, with around 350 employees worldwide and its own production, logistics and sales locations in Germany, the USA, China, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and the Netherlands. Fath specializes in the development, manufacturing and distribution of system components.

These include components from the fields of mechanical engineering, industrial enclosure construction and equipment manufacturing, as well as the visualization and material flow of intralogistics.

Background of the project

Fath's management faced the decision of integrating a new, fully integrated business intelligence (BI) system. Introducing one is often a time and are most of these BI tools often only usable 100% by very large companies, or the cost of such systems is extremely high and not always justifiable for mid-sized companies.

Fath's goal was therefore chosen so that the cost-benefit ratio would be balanced, and so that a new BI system could be precisely tailored to Fath's needs. It also had to be ensured that this central tool could be used by all authorized employees without first having to complete lengthy training or being a specialist in the field. Furthermore, all evaluations from the current system also had to be possible with the new tool.

Software from Atlassian and LivelyApps – primarily Confluence and PocketQuery – was the logical choice based on these requirements. Combined with Google Sheets, PocketQuery is excellent for graphically and visually mapping large data sets within Confluence and can be heavily customized depending on the use case.

The most important requirements:

• simple use of the system by all employees
• mapping of all important company data within Confluence
• the option to personalize and easily extend the new BI system
• integration of the internal CRM system into the software landscape

The old, existing business intelligence (BI) system was meant to be kept in its original form but mapped in Confluence. It also had to be ensured that all existing functions were carried over into the new system and were easy to use for all authorized users.

The approach

In most production and industrial companies, countless products are made and sold every day, generating a large amount of data that in turn is fed into various systems. Systems like an ERP system or the internal CRM system usually require independent administration and a manual export of data in order to then process it with another tool (BI).

Providing the data in Confluence

To first create the option of using Confluence as a BI tool, all relevant databases first had to be integrated and connected in Confluence together with PocketQuery. The data is then displayed visually on individual Confluence pages using the Google Sheets plugin and made accessible to employees.

Integrating the CRM system

To get a complete picture of all data, an interface to the CRM system was also built. This allows the respective accounts (customers), products or product groups to be linked with the specific data sets. This also makes it possible to get comprehensive reports directly on individual categories.

User and permission management

Due to Fath's international presence, permission management is needed to protect certain company data from unauthorized access. Our solution is a comprehensive user management system that only shows all data to those employees who are authorized for the respective data set. This ultimately removes user management from the old BI system and manages it directly in Confluence instead.

You can find out more about permission management for Jira and Confluence here.