Atlassian / Confluence
Business Intelligence System with Confluence
Hard facts of the project
Solution and Methology
Use of Confluence as a documentation and communication tool, development of an authorization management system and integration of business intelligence functions in Confluence. Together with Fath24 first of all, all relevant requirements were coordinated in a workshop and adapted to the special features of Confluence and Pocketquery as a BI tool.
Products used
Atlassian Confluence for Data Center, Refined for Confluence, Pocketquerry, EasyMind, LanguageManager, Translations for Confluence, Advanced Image Gallery, EasyMind, Space Privacy - Extranet for Confluence, Table Filter and Charts for Confluence.
About Fath
Fath is a medium-sized group of companies based in Spalt, Franconia, and has around 350 employees worldwide and its own production, logistics and sales locations in Germany, the USA, China, Hungary, the UK, Mexico, Brazil and the Netherlands. Fath specializes in the development, manufacture and sale of system components.
This includes components from the fields of mechanical engineering, industrial enclosure construction, production equipment construction as well as visualization and the material flow of intralogistics.
Use of Confluence as a business intelligence tool
Background to the project
The management of Fath was faced with the decision to integrate a new and fully integrated Business Intelligence System (BI). Often the implementation is a time consuming and most of these BI tools are often only for very large companies 100% to use or the cost of such systems extremely high and not always justifiable in medium-sized businesses.
Fath's goal was therefore to achieve both a balanced cost-benefit ratio and to ensure that a new BI system could be precisely tailored to Fath's needs. In addition, it had to be ensured that this central tool could also be used by all authorized employees without first having to complete lengthy training courses or be a specialist in the field. Furthermore, all evaluations of the current system should also be possible with the new tool.
The software from Atlassian and LivelyApps - primarily Confluence and Pocketquery - were the logical choice based on these requirements. Pocketquery, in conjunction with Google Sheets, is great for graphically/visually mapping large data sets within Confluence and can be highly customized depending on the purpose.
Key Requirements:
- Easy use of the system by all employees
- Mapping of all important company data within Confluence
- Possibility to personalize and easily extend the new BI system
- Integration of the internal CRM system into the software landscape
Challenges and solution
The old / existing Business Intelligence System (BI) should be retained in its original form, but mapped in Confluence. Furthermore, it should be ensured that all existing functions are transferred to the new system and are easy to use for all authorized users.
The approach
In most production and industrial companies, countless products are manufactured and sold every day, generating a large amount of data that is in turn imported into various systems. Systems such as an ERP system or even the internal CRM system often require independent management and manual export of data in order to subsequently process them with another tool (BI).
Provision of the data in Confluence
In order to first create the possibility of using Confluence as a BI tool, all relevant databases first had to be integrated and embedded in Confluence together with Pocketquery. The data is then visually displayed on individual Confluence pages using the Google Sheets plugin and made accessible to employees.
Integration of the CRM system
In order to obtain a holistic mapping of all data, an interface to the CRM system was also created. This allows the respective accounts (customers), products or product groups to be linked to the specific data records. From this consideration, it is additionally possible to directly receive holistic reportings on the individual categories.
User & authorization management
Due to the existing international orientation of Fath, it is necessary that a Authorization Management from unauthorized access to certain company data exists. Our solution is a comprehensive user management system, which only shows all data to those employees who also have the authorization for the respective data set. This ultimately eliminates the user management from the old BI system and is controlled directly in Confluence.
You can find more about permission management for Jira and Confluence in here.
Results at Fath
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Sophisticated user management with access management: User management directly in Confluence instead of in the BI system.
- Synchronization of Active Directories / Databases with Confluence.
- Combination of business intelligence tool with documentation / collaboration tool.
- Direct description of products, graphics, drawings or data in Confluence.
- Use of business data (e.g. turnover, sales, costs etc.) on the respective product pages to bundle all important data in one place.
- Visualization of data within Confluence with Pocketquery and Google Sheets
More information
Want to learn more about Confluence and how to use it as a business intelligence tool?
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