6 min read
A national care group delivering residential, supported living, and specialist care services across multiple regions. The organisation ran on multiple systems: care management platforms, BambooHR for people management, a separate payroll system, SharePoint for documentation, and various spreadsheets maintained by individual departments. Senior leaders relied on monthly reports compiled manually by team leads, and the data was often weeks out of date by the time decisions were made.
Service: Tech Consulting Care sub-sector: Residential, supported living, specialist care
The organisation had data in abundance but insight in shortage. Every system held valuable information: occupancy rates, staff turnover, agency usage, training compliance, incidents, complaints, safeguarding referrals, and financial performance. The problem was that this data lived in separate systems, maintained by separate teams, and was never brought together in a way that supported decision-making.
Monthly board reports were compiled manually. A regional manager would export data from the care management system, cross-reference it with HR data from BambooHR, add financial figures from the finance team, and present the result in a PowerPoint slide deck. The process took days, involved copying data between spreadsheets, and was prone to errors at every stage. By the time the board saw the numbers, they were describing the organisation as it was four to six weeks ago.
Operational teams had even less visibility. A registered manager could see what was happening in their own care home but had no easy way to compare performance with other homes in the group, spot trends, or identify early warning signs. If agency spend was creeping up in one region, or incident rates were rising in a particular service type, nobody would notice until the next monthly report.
For a care provider, this lag matters. An increase in falls, a spike in medication errors, or rising staff turnover are not just operational metrics. They are indicators that the quality of care may be deteriorating. If the data is weeks old when it reaches the people who can act on it, the window for early intervention has already closed.
The organisation needed to move from retrospective reporting to real-time visibility, without requiring every manager to become a data analyst.
We designed and deployed a Power BI business intelligence platform, connecting the organisation's core data sources into a centralised reporting layer that updates automatically.
The first step was identifying the metrics that mattered most to each audience. We worked with the senior leadership team, regional managers, registered managers, and departmental heads to define what they needed to see, how often, and at what level of detail. A board member needs a high-level view of organisational performance. A registered manager needs their home's data with the ability to drill into specifics. These are different dashboards serving different decisions.
We built data connections to the core systems: the care management platform for occupancy, incidents, and care delivery metrics; BambooHR for staffing, turnover, and compliance data; the financial system for revenue, costs, and budget performance; and SharePoint lists for training records and compliance tracking. Where direct connections weren't possible, we created automated data extraction processes that feed into the Power BI data model on a scheduled basis.
The data model was designed to allow cross-system analysis. Staffing data from HR could be viewed alongside incident data from the care management system, revealing correlations that were previously invisible. Agency usage could be compared against staff turnover by region. Training compliance could be viewed alongside care quality indicators.
Dashboards were built for each audience:
Data refreshes were configured to run automatically, so dashboards always reflect current data without anyone needing to manually update them. Row-level security ensures that each user sees only the data relevant to their role and responsibility.
The organisation moved from monthly manual reporting to real-time, automated dashboards. Senior leaders now see current performance data whenever they need it, not in a static slide deck presented weeks after the fact.
The manual report compilation process that consumed days of management time each month has been eliminated. Regional managers who previously spent hours extracting and formatting data now open a dashboard and see the current picture immediately. That time has been returned to operational leadership.
Cross-system visibility has already revealed insights that were invisible before. The ability to overlay staffing data with care quality metrics showed a clear correlation between high agency usage in specific homes and elevated incident rates. This led to targeted recruitment and retention interventions rather than organisation-wide initiatives that would have been less effective and more expensive.
Registered managers value the comparative views most. Being able to see how their home performs against peers in the group, not as a judgement but as a learning tool, has created a culture of data-informed improvement. If one home has significantly lower falls rates, others can investigate what they are doing differently.
The automated refresh means the data is always current. When a board member asks a question about performance, the answer is available immediately and based on today's data. Decisions about resource allocation, service development, and operational priorities are now grounded in evidence rather than instinct.
Power BI dashboards deployed for senior leadership and operational teams · Data connected from care management, HR, finance, and compliance systems · Real-time visibility replacing monthly manual reporting · Automated data refresh eliminating manual extraction · Decision-making grounded in current data for the first time
Related service: Tech Consulting
The people responsible for care quality can now see what is happening across their organisation today, not what happened last month. When the data shows that something needs attention, they can act while there is still time to make a difference. Better data means better decisions, and better decisions mean better care.