Learn how Red Canoe Credit Union exceeded its own expectations and completed a successful Tableau to Power BI transition in less than 30 days.
When Kelly Gage joined Red Canoe in 2018, the credit union started investing more in BI initiatives. A certified Tableau developer, Kelly successfully rolled out multiple fully-functional dashboards with Tableau, helping Red Canoe’s business lines and executive team achieve deeper business insights and enforce data-driven decisions.
While Tableau gave Red Canoe the momentum they needed to crack into BI, Tableau’s days were numbered when the credit union migrated to Microsoft Office 365. This development wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue, but Kelly and her team were not ready to roll Tableau out of service just yet.
Russ Peters, the BI Manager at Red Canoe, realized it made the most sense to use Power BI instead of Tableau.
“We brought Kelly on as a certified Tableau developer. But it became clear as soon as the credit union migrated to Office 365, that it was going to be a lot easier and a lot more cost-effective for us to move towards Power BI,” Russ said.
Now, after two years of building data dashboards and handling BI efforts in Tableau, Kelly was handed a new mission: To sunset Tableau and migrate all dashboards to Power BI.
"We were looking at a good 6-8 months...but with CSG (Skypoint), we migrated from Tableau in a month."
Sunsetting Tableau out of service and migrating to Power BI is easier said than done. While Kelly is a certified Tableau developer, her Power BI knowledge base was limited. And with the sheer size of the credit union’s Tableau dashboards, which had been collecting data for nearly two years, the challenge was a substantial one to face.
Kelly had spent an entire year building dashboards in Tableau to the point where the executive team is comfortable reading its report daily. Because the executive team had gotten used to Tableau, migrating Red Canoe’s data dashboards to a whole new tool was “a big, scary thing,” in Kelly’s words.
“We knew Power BI was going to be better, but it had to be right because this is our executive team,” Kelly said.
Knowing what was at stake, Kelly realized she needed to bring in outside support.
“I had taken a training class to learn Power BI, but this migration was a huge undertaking,” said Kelly. “We needed somebody to help us set up the data gateway and start using the tool. Skypoint offered a flexible hybrid plan where we could both leverage their consulting expertise and actually set up the data gateway too.”
"We knew Power BI was going to be better,
but it had to be right."
After a brief discussion with Russ, Kelly set up a call with the team at Skypoint.
“It became very clear that the Skypoint team was really concerned about helping us solve our problems,” Russ said. “Our problem became their challenge.”
During the initial call, the Skypoint team helped Kelly and Russ realize that the Tableau-Power BI migration was not as complicated as they’d imagined. Expecting the transition to be a long, drawn-out process, Russ and Kelly had scheduled it to be completed over 6-8 months.
In less than a month, Red Canoe was able to implement the gateway and migrate the entire ecosystem to Power BI. Support and mentorship from the Skypoint team helped set the Red Canoe team up for this quick and important win for their organization.
For Russ, it was a “mind-blowing” turn of events. For Kelly, it was the beginning of her journey into the exciting world of Power BI.
“Skypoint didn’t just complete the Tableau migration and hand things off,” said Kelly. “They worked with me and taught me how to migrate it, showed me how the two tools work differently, then made sure that I would be able to maintain the new Power BI reports.”
At this stage, Kelly’s Power BI skills had greatly improved, giving her the confidence to pursue what she would describe as her most impactful experience…the Branch Scorecard
"Skypoint didn't just hand things off. They spent time teaching me how to migrate from Tableau to Power BI."
Following her Power BI mentorship with Skypoint, Kelly and her team built a Branch Scorecard—a KPI dashboard used by the service delivery team for tracking goals and incentives.
The Branch Scorecard helps the Red Canoe team see how they measure up to their monthly goals. Using the scorecard was a completely manual process where the managers would spend up to a week inputting data from multiple data sources on a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet would then be forwarded to the regional manager, who would go through it before sending it to someone else. The process would continue until the scorecards from all the branches got consolidated into one overarching dashboard.
After years of enduring drawn-out manual processes, the Red Canoe team decided to incorporate some automation. Kelly’s aim was to automate the scorecard so that the data would be computed in real-time, and the managers would be able to look at it every day—not just at the end of the month.
“We’re excited to go live with the Branch Scorecard this year, ” Kelly said. “The Scorecard has been in validation by frontline managers. They have audited it and picked it apart to death…and guess what? They love everything about it.”
Once the Branch Scorecard is rolled out, the managers will no longer have to wait until the end of the month to access reports, and the staff members will no longer have to endure manual data entry.
With Power BI in its rightful place, Kelly, Russ, and the entire Red Canoe team can only look forward to the future where there are many more BI milestones to conquer.
"Skypoint is nothing like the typical standoffish vendor relationship. It's like working with a teammate."
