TripleLift brings data to its employees with PowerBI Robots

TripleLift works in a very data-rich environment that generates tens of billions of rows of data every day. To deal with all this data, TripleLift adopted Power BI and started designing reports and dashboards for several of its business areas. While these reports have always been helpful and available online, only power users were accessing them. Very few employees had an interest in logging into Power BI, navigating through their reports, creating slices, and drilling down into data. TripleLift wanted to engage them more with business data, but to do so, they had to start serving these reports instead of asking employees to go to them. Simon Adell, TripleLift’s CFO and Power BI advocate, started emailing key reports to the company’s CEO, but unpleased with Power BI’s email functionality, he googled a solution capable of automating and sending Power BI reports by email.

TripleLift was an early adopter of PowerBI Robots, implementing DevScope’s tool only a few weeks after its launch. After testing it on a laptop, the company found PowerBI Robots to be very easy to use and exactly what they needed to create the email distributions they were looking for. TripleLift could finally flip the paradigm from employees logging into their Power BI account to use the dashboards, to one where they pushed data to them almost exclusively in static images from emails distributed by PowerBI Robots.

“I liken the change with PowerBI Robots to having modern plumbing instead of having to go outside and pump water manually. The water itself might be the same, but now it just flows. Data can be used by everyone inside our house and for almost any reason. It’s changed us materially.”

– Simon Adell, CFO at TripleLift

TripleLift produces a tremendous amount of data, so with data flowing to employees, the next step was to not hose them down with it. PowerBI Robots allows organizations to apply filters to data so different people receive different data from the same report and TripleLift took full advantage of this feature. If an employee manages five accounts, a dashboard approach means that the employee needs to log into Power BI and apply filters to the global report five times to see that data. With PowerBI Robots, filters are applied beforehand, and those five views are sent to each account manager via email, saving them time in the process. Because almost all data is consumed in mobile devices at TripleLift, they came up with an ingenious solution: design vertical Power BI reports – mostly tables, but also some charts – so they fit smartphone screens. This way, anyone can consume Power BI reports anywhere and adjusted to their screens.

Due to their large volume of Power BI distributions via PowerBI Robots, TripleLift also came up with a code system to make reports easy to find in an email inbox according to area and date. This doubles as a record-keeping system that can be used in audits and has been in place at TripleLift long before we started recommending using PowerBI Robots as an audit evidence tool.

Thanks to PowerBI Robots, TripleLift managed to get employees invested in their business data by bringing them Power BI reports instead of having them consult the reports online. Data is sent to employees every day – often more than once a day – and with images of the Power BI reports right in the email body, all it takes is opening the email to see data filtered accordingly.

“Our Power BI distributions are the life and blood of keeping track of our very complicated business and, with over 500 employees, the amount of work required to do this manually would be significant. Our PowerBI Robots Integration changed all that.”

– Simon Adell, CFO at TripleLift