Business intelligence case study: one platform and its dashboards for dental practices, with reporting time cut by up to 40 to 50%

The challenge: bringing services, sign-ins and reporting together

Before the platform, practices dealt with multiple separate services and vendors, and reporting meant pulling operational and financial data together from several places. The goal was simpler operations, fewer disjointed workflows, and better data and reporting behind the decisions practices make about their business.

The platform needed to meet four requirements:

• Many services, one experience. Each service had workflows and needs of its own: procurement, lab services, equipment repair, vendor management, training and analysis. All of them had to work as one consistent platform.
• One sign-in. People move between several connected applications and services, and shouldn't have to log in to each one again, so authentication had to work from one platform to the next.
• Volume. Practices, vendors and service providers all deal with one another, and the transactions and workflows between them grew more complex. The platform had to handle high volumes of connected data and stay fast and reliable.
• Reporting. The business intelligence dashboards had to bring together operational and financial data from several sources and turn it into information practice owners and administrators can use.

What we built: business intelligence dashboards on one multi-tenant platform

We built the front end, the back end and the dashboards. Six pieces carry it:

• One platform for many services and vendors. Lab operations, procurement, training programmes, equipment services, practice management, vendor management and reporting all run in one place, so practice teams can work across services without moving between separate tools. Organisations that adopted the platform saved an estimated 30 to 40% of the administrative effort that vendor relations and business processes took.
• Each practice's data kept separate. A multi-tenant design keeps thousands of dental practices independent on one shared platform, and REST APIs connect the services and leave room for later integrations.
• One sign-in across services. OAuth 2.0 authentication, with an authorisation flow that works across platforms, lets people reach the connected systems with one sign-in experience. Single sign-on reduced how often each person has to log in, and authentication-related support requests fell by around 25 to 35% on average.
• Business logic and data underneath. Laravel runs the business logic, the service workflows, the reporting processes and the links between the platform's modules. MySQL is the main database, for operational data, transactions, vendor records and practice data.
• Business intelligence dashboards. The dashboards and analytics tools show practice owners and administrators their purchasing activity, service usage, performance and profitability. With this reporting and analytics work, generating and reviewing business performance data takes up to 40 to 50% less time than manual reporting.
• An interface for many kinds of work. React and Material UI keep the interface responsive across business functions and service areas, and make involved workflows easier to follow. Cloud infrastructure and API optimisations keep up with the platform's growth and its heavy transaction volume.

Where the reporting stops, and who takes over

There's no AI model in this one: the dashboards bring the numbers together, and the people who run each practice decide what to do about them.

This is the split our automated reporting starts from: code gathers the data and lays it out, and the decisions stay with the people who run the business. A model is worth adding only where a step needs reading or judgement, and none went into this platform.

Results

Practice owners and administrators reach business information more easily, and less of their time goes on administration. More than 19,000 practices and organisations use the platform, and its design lets it grow as their needs change.

Technologies and tools

If reporting still takes time away from your team

If your team still builds its reports by hand from several systems, our automated reporting ties each number to its source before a report goes out. When two dashboards disagree about the same figure, our data analytics consulting settles one definition per metric, inside the BI tool you already use.