HEPSA

Higher Ed Partners South Africa works with +OneX to optimise Power BI reporting. A Managed Services agreement clears the way for a more efficient business intelligence environment.

The client

Higher Ed Partners South Africa (HEPSA) is part of an international family of companies that specialise in making quality higher education accessible and affordable on four continents. Established in South Africa in 2016, HEPSA has already converted and launched many successful online learning programmes at some of South Africa’s leading universities as well as further abroad in the rest of Africa.

The Challenge

HESPA wanted to embrace a culture of data-driven decision-making across its organisation, but lacked the in-house ICT capacity to implement, maintain and manage a modern business intelligence solution. The company turned to new-age managed services company and systems integrator, +OneX, for help in defining its project reporting requirements, designing reports for its business and digital marketing teams, and supporting and maintaining its Microsoft Power BI environment.

The Solution

HEPSA brought +OneX on board to develop reports and manage its implementation of Microsoft’s Power BI. +OneX proposed a managed services arrangement that would not only support HEPSA with the initial reports the business requested but also continuous report development, maintenance, support and optimisation of its Power BI environment. Through +OneX Power BI Managed Services, HEPSA has access to a team of BI developers with vast experience from multiple other client projects to manage and maintain the Power BI environment, relieving it of the need to attract and retain scarce, expensive skills.

+OneX works closely with HEPSA to continually analyse its data, build out visualisations and glean insights from the data for the benefit of key stakeholders. Microsoft is investing heavily in its Power BI Service which is rapidly growing with changes introduced every month. The +OneX Power BI Managed Services team also keeps HEPSA up to date with advice on the new features of the Power BI environment, as well as providing insights into how it could drive more value from its investment in business intelligence.

Simon Harvey

Head of Data at +OneX

Once an organisation has developed its reports in Power BI, the Power BI environment still takes time to maintain and manage. From refreshing data sources, credentials and dataflows to updating reports and visuals, a company needs to do a lot of ongoing work to ensure it gets the most from a Power BI deployment. As HEPSA’s strategic data analytics managed services partner, we aim to give the company the peace of mind of knowing it is getting the most insight and value from its business data.

Business value achieved

HEPSA now has access to customised marketing and business reports that help it make timely decisions based on accurate, data-driven insight. With +OneX’s help, it has created a reliable and efficient reporting infrastructure that retrieves data from multiple data sources, including Salesforce, Google and Facebook. This in turn saves time for the entire team, puts accurate data about leads and marketing spending in decision-makers’ hands, and maps how each metric relates to key team KPIs that drive the strategic goals of the organisation.

+OneX and HEPSA now have a solid foundation in place to uncover further opportunities to improve business value and reduce operating costs.

Our approach to marketing and enrolments is highly data-driven. At Higher Ed Partners SA (HEPSA) we market online programmes on behalf of Universities and as a result we take a very programme-specific approach. This means understanding who the ideal audience is for each programme, targeting that audience with the right message, at the right time, on the right channel and then implementing lead nurture and conversion actions to ensure leads convert into enrolled students and then continue to complete their studies. This approach requires real-time data to feed into systems that power paid media algorithms, marketing automation systems and executive dashboards. The work we do with the BI team at +OneX has greatly enhanced our data capabilities so that we make smarter decisions based on insights from data.