Business Objective
Our client is a mid-market Private Equity firm. The client partners and invests in the lower middle market, privately held, high growth, enterprise software, and tech-enabled service businesses across North America. The client wanted to create a Business Intelligence (BI) layer and intelligent search capability for senior leadership as well as associates.
Specifically, the client wanted to
- Identify and create the right BI views for senior leadership to review and benchmark the company’s performance
- Provide full data access to associates through BI layer and intelligent search over structured and unstructured data enabling them to perform deeper exploratory analysis
- Integrate existing excel based models with centralized BI layer
Challenges
- Disjointed systems, data spread across multiple systems/files/formats
- Retrieving data/analysis from prior evaluations were extremely difficult and time-consuming
- Very low utilization of insights from unstructured data
Solution Methodology
- Identified the right KPIs and views (Portfolio, Company level, Sector/Sub-sector level views, etc).
- Developed visualization layer with necessary features e.g., ability to drill down, benchmark, set alerts/reminders, etc.
- Built a smart search engine using NLP based algorithms to enable information retrieval from both structured and unstructured data
- Integrated existing financial models with the visualization layer to auto-populate model parameters and enable scenario analysis
- Set up near real-time triggers/alerts (daily update of data)
- Integrated with portfolio company’s data and reports to create a single source of information
Business Impact
- Significant improvement in speed of execution (>10x reduction in analysis time)
- First of its kind 360-degree evaluation of a company based on historical, current, and future-looking business signals
- Ability to benchmark a company against peers, portfolio, previous investments, industry, etc.
