Long & Partners Group keeps clients updated with PowerBI Portal

The client:

The Long & Partners Group (L&P Group) is a multi-disciplinary building services consultancy firm with over 60 staff based in the City of London and teams in Manchester and Doha, Qatar, specialized in delivering services carefully coordinated to achieve true building performance. L&P Group’s schemes encompass workplace, residential and mixed-use development, as well as education, sport, and leisure, and services include building services design, mechanical and electrical public health design, technology consultancy (smart building, comms rooms), sustainability consultancy, asset consultancy and commissioning management.

The challenge:

L&P Group wanted to share the progress of works with clients in the commissioning management side of their business. Initially, the group kept clients updated by sharing with them a quite large Excel file, but the process wasn’t elegant, and the data wasn’t easy to absorb in table form. Like many companies operating in construction, L&P Group has relied on Autodesk technologies for many years and gave its reporting capabilities a go but found the output too basic and not client friendly.

Riccardo Bennett-Lovsey, Chief Technology Officer at L&P Group, introduced the company to Power BI and started feeding data from Autodesk directly into Microsoft’s tool. Through Power BI, L&P Group was now generating beautiful and customized reports and sharing them with clients by exporting them as PDFs and sending them via email. This method was adequate, but required some manual labour exporting reports, annexing them to emails, and sending those emails to each recipient. It also lacked something L&P Group’s clients wanted: interactivity and data drilling.

The solution:

L&P Group discovered PowerBI Portal "simply by typing into Google exactly what we are looking for". The company wanted a way to share Power BI reports externally and PowerBI Portal allowed them to do just that. Thanks to PowerBI Portal’s row-level user security, L&P Group paired clients with reports on their respective ongoing construction works and gave each client a unique access code to their PowerBI Portal, which they can use anywhere. These reports are as interactive as any other report on Power BI Online, granting clients the ability to drill down data with the same level of granularity and be always up to date with the progress the L&P Group team is making on their projects.

"Clients love the tech side. They love to be able to click a link and see a nice graphical report displaying our progress. The PDF was fine and had all the information, but the experience is so much better this way."

– Peter Humphries, Operations Director at L&P Group

Results:

The transition from static PDFs of reports sent via email to interactive reports online was seamless and clients enjoy the interactivity provided by the Long & Partners Group through Power BI Portal. So much so that many of them are sharing their access code with their own clients to keep them up to date on the works taking place.

The Long & Partners Group team is also designing reports with the client experience with mind, featuring arrows for easy navigation and information distributed accordingly.

"Power BI Portal is a fantastic product. It solves the problem of how to share custom Power BI reports with external users, without having to overspend on hosting or compromise the integrity of your own IT estate. Simple, well-built, and secure. It is a pleasure to use software that works so well."

– Riccardo Bennett-Lovsey, Chief Technology Officer at L&P Group