Automating Financial Reporting for Time and Cost Savings

About the Business 

This American pharmaceuticals manufacturer develops, manufactures, and markets generic and prescription drugs, as well as animal and consumer health products.

The Business Challenges

This pharmaceutical client’s financial month-end process required multiple consulting firm resources to run, which was financially burdensome. It also required a team of internal resources to dedicate numerous hours each month to data manipulation, validation, and troubleshooting. They sought to cut costs and time spent on this process so their staff could address other pressing needs.

The 2nd Watch Solution

Our client’s finance team ran their month-end close process using Amazon Redshift and Tableau Server workbooks that contained custom SQL logic. They would load Redshift with data each month and then, one after another, they would run Tableau workbooks to extract, transform, validate, and reupload data to Redshift. It was a very manual process prone to human errors supported by two resources at a large consulting firm.

2nd Watch’s challenge was to remove the business logic from the Tableau Server workbooks and convert it to run on Snowflake. We then needed to set up our client’s Azure environment and use ADF to automate several processes, such as refreshing workbooks, extracting and manipulating data from Tableau reports, and inserting the data into other Snowflake tables used for further Tableau reports.

The Business Benefits

The 2nd Watch team trained a resource who has successfully maintained our solution with minimal help. Because of this, our client was able to move off of Redshift and Tableau Server, and they then ended their support contract with the consulting firm they were working with prior to this project. Additionally, we automated several manual processes, freeing up client resources and saving them time and money.