Though we don’t often spotlight our internal solutions, there is one we’ve developed that we think warrants your attention and has been well received by the public-sector clients that we have shared it with…introducing the FI$Cal Analytics Report.
THE BUSINESS NEED
Since the beginning of 2020, the State of California have awarded $1,223,221,266 in contracts.Our questions were pretty simple:
- What departments are spending money in the state on IT goods and services?
- What vendors are winning contracts?
- What vendors are working with which departments?
BUILDING THE SOLUTION
In order to better answer these questions, we solicited the help of three of our team members that work in our Data Analytics and Visualization Practice Group to help build a dashboard. The dashboard would allow us to filter FI$Cal data by department, description of the procurement, supplier name, and even purchase amounts.Our team utilized the awesome capabilities of Power BI to aggregate data from FI$Cal to drill down to get more specific information about departments across the state and their procurement history. Our development team incorporated “sliders” and filtering functionality to enable us to view data for a specific date range or focus in on specific acquisition types.
Put simply, our team created a dashboard we could use at any time and be able to answer the questions we presented earlier, in real-time. The example shown below demonstrates what is displayed on the dashboard when you apply a date range of 1/1/2017 to present and focus on one department, Office of Systems Integration.
As you can see, we get total spend, list of vendors that were awarded contracts (with award amount) as well as an itemized list of procurements.
While FI$Cal data is readily available, this solution for analyzing the data is extremely valuable. We can adapt the views to gather insights and extract information that allows us to make informed business decisions.
HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS DASHBOARD
While the data that powers this dashboard is public, the dashboard and its design are the intellectual property of Kiefer Consulting. We have shared this dashboard with several IT leaders in the state and they have expressed interest in being granted access to the dashboard. This is something we can offer our partners in the public-sector. If you are interested in getting access to this dashboard to view FI$Cal data, please contact us.We can provide you with authorized access to the FI$Cal Analytics Dashboard for free. Call us at (916) 932-7220 or e-mail Brian Wallace at bwallace@kieferconsulting.com.
