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May 30, 2023

Dentsu builds Azure-supported analytics platform to modernize data across the organization

Dentsu is a marketing and advertising network dedicated to brand partnership that delivers meaningful progress and growth through unique and innovative media campaigns and bespoke data-driven solutions. The global organization spans more than 145 markets with 65,000 employees, serving 11,000 clients.

Dentsu Aegis Network

Originally, most data consumption within dentsu came from finance, HR, and operations. Users were extracting raw data, pushing it into Microsoft Excel, and executing numerous functions and pivot tables to extract the necessary results. This process created a frequency of repeated, manual steps with no automation, collaboration, or single source of the truth for reporting. The effort to produce reports was slow and outdated. To achieve greater success across the organization, dentsu decided to invest in a modern data analytics effort that would take their business transformation to the next level.  

Discovering Power BI and bringing it to dentsu

In 2014, Patrick Sura, Director of Business Intelligence at dentsu, was introduced to an early reporting tool: Power BI. He saw the greater vision of the tool and knew this would be the right fit for dentsu’s needs. The team at dentsu were impressed by how interactive the reports were: they had never been able to interact with their data in such a seamless way.

“[With Power BI] you can see your data in a visual way which you have never seen before—where you can see anomalies and outliers. It was starting to tell a story,” explains Sura. Eager to expand Power BI usage and harness their data in a more effective way, dentsu set out to expand reporting and build a data warehouse. These investments set dentsu on their way to building a bigger and better reporting initiative to improve their overall business decisions.

Within 4 to 6 months, the newly appointed team had built—together with dentsu’s partner OneLake—the foundation for Samurai: dentsu’s data analytics and insights platform. Supported by Sensei, its modern data warehouse, and Ronin, its integrated business application, the Samurai ecosystem has been revolutionary for reporting and data-driven decision making within dentsu.

Dentsu’s data and analytics platform
Figure 1: Sensei, Samurai, and Ronin are the three foundational elements of dentsu’s data and analytics platform. 

 

Creating a synergistic platform with Samurai, Sensei, and Ronin

For dentsu’s analytics platform to be successful, all three core components needed to work together seamlessly. To make communication between the core components effective, raw data from various source systems is first moved into Sensei, the core data warehouse, hosted in Azure. Within Sensei, data is processed via Azure Data Factory and then stored in Azure Data Lake Gen2. Due to the size of data Sensei is processing, Serverless SQL pools within Azure Synapse Analytics is leveraged to help distribute the processing of data and maintain performance in the platform despite scale. Synapse pipelines will also eventually replace the use of Azure Data Factory pipelines. After data is prepped, it’s pushed into Samurai which is then filtered into Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and Paginated Reports where users can access data for their specific needs.

Ronin controls all the master data mapping and security within the entire platform. The web front-end maps to all the source systems to ensure proper data management across the platform and all data usage. Ronin is built on the low-code platform GapTeq.

Orchestrating the unified data model to consolidate data from multiple systems

The biggest challenge for the BI team is the consolidation of data across the entire organization which come from multiple different systems. To achieve a harmonized system landscape the data is merged from different timesheets and project systems into one dataset. To ensure the process is controlled, organized, and high quality, the team had to establish strict data and BI governance and realize standard structures of their solution. This harmonization is the key concept which takes place from extraction, via the Data Lake and the Synapse SQL Pool until the Power BI datasets. 

Core components of the Dentsu architecture
Figure 2: dentsu’s architecture breaks down how its three core components—Sensei, Samurai, and Ronin—work together to create a seamless platform.  

 

Developing a culture of high-quality reporting

When it comes to reporting at dentsu, the business intelligence team work to build reports that fit a wide variety of needs within the organization. Not only has the team helped to build multiple reports, but they have also built a centralized data set that users can leverage alongside pre-established reports and dashboards.

Timesheet compliance dashboard

The timesheet compliance dashboard is a tool used across the organization that highlights the completeness of timesheet data. Since dentsu works with a variety of brands and accumulates many contracting hours, it’s important for leadership to easily understand how the workforce is supporting clients. The dashboard breaks down logged working hours and highlights major KPIs the company wants to understand. With the Timesheet Compliance Dashboard, compliance has increased from 90% to 98%, and dashboard use has increased 30%.

Timesheet compliance data
Figure 3: Timesheet compliance data helps leadership track logged hours and client hours. 

The business intelligence team at dentsu has also created personalized timesheet dashboards where each user can access their personal dashboard to understand the breakdown of hours per day and month, as well as absences.

Client Cockpit

Another dashboard dentsu created is called Client Cockpit which showcases the performance of the clients. The dashboard is used by client leads to highlight revenue versus profit breakdown, and drill down into the specific avenue of revenue (TV, online, print, etc.) to provide forecasting data. The Client Cockpit creates a story with data that informs client leads on how to best support clients and enables dentsu to make more data-driven decisions.

Bringing analytics and insights to more users 

Currently, there are nearly 23,000 reports within dentsu—a combination of self-service reports and the reports created by the BI team. The business intelligence team has set up weekly “think tanks” that serve as a casual forum for anyone to discuss new Power BI learnings or problems they are facing. The team also leads quarterly training courses to onboard more users onto Power BI. What once started at just 15 people per session has now expanded to nearly 50 people per session.

With this new platform, dentsu has built a reporting and analytics ecosystem that users can trust and do more, with less. Anything marked with a Samurai logo lets users know that they’re working with the highest quality data and can always rely on the dashboards and reports they’re using.

Looking ahead, dentsu is focused on scaling Samurai and bringing in more users. They are focused on further leveraging the Microsoft Intelligence Data Platform to create a unified data model and scale Sensei into data sets to maintain a strict data lineage. With this growth in mind, dentsu is excited about the future of reporting and getting high-quality analytics into the hands of more individuals.

“[With Power BI] you can see your data in a visual way which you have never seen before—where you can see anomalies and outliers. It was starting to tell a story.”

Patrick Sura, Director of Business Intelligence, dentsu

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