The Analytics Engineer, made possible by TimeXtender!

In my previous blog in the Analytics Engineer blog series, I described what an Analytics Engineer is. In this new blog I want to tell you how I discovered this new way of working thanks to TimeXtender. The possibilities of a low-code solution like TimeXtender create a new way of working that was not possible before. And this way of working is particularly suitable and interesting for SMB organizations.

The problem

A few years ago, before I started at E-mergo, I worked as a Business Consultant. In that role I built Power BI reports with data straight from a CRM system and used data from Excel, make that a lot of Excel. The amount of data and our ambitions got stuck on this setup, and we wanted to take the step to a next level. So we looked at the proven approach of a Microsoft data warehouse with SSIS and Power BI on top of it. We got started on that. We found budget for a Data Engineer and went looking.

The search

That this failed turned out to be our luck. What happened? Our search for a Data Engineer was difficult. We couldn't find anyone who fitted us. We were also worried about the single point of failure we were creating. Frankly, we were stuck in between: our ambitions were too big for our current setup, but our organization was too small for a full-fledged data team.

By chance we ended up in a TimeXtender demo, in which I realized: I can do this as a Business Consultant too! Thanks to the accessible interface and the automation in the background, I was suddenly able to build the data warehouse myself. For that reason, instead of one Data Engineer we hired an extra Business Consultant. Now we both held the conversations with the business, built the data warehouse together in TimeXtender and both created the reports in Power BI. This saved us an enormous amount of time, while neither of us was a single point of failure.

The Analytics Engineer is someone who can carry out the entire data pipeline. The Analytics Engineer is therefore involved in:

• gathering the question from the business
• building the data structures
• and delivering the dashboards.

No intermediate steps are needed in this process anymore.

The Analytics Engineer as the solution

Later I realized that we had in fact started working as Analytics Engineers.

As you can see in the figure above, besides the speed that TimeXtender's automation brought, we could also respond faster to the business and deliver results. Of course you still have to carry out all the steps from information analysis to building and testing the data warehouse carefully, but there was no longer any handover to other disciplines.

The result

In the end we grew into a whole team of Analytics Engineers. This meant we could stand in for each other during illness or vacation, so we no longer had a single point of failure. TimeXtender also helped us greatly with this through the automated documentation you get along with it. More importantly, in TimeXtender's interface data lineage is often clear at a glance or within a few clicks. And when things got very technical, or when we got stuck, we could always turn to E-mergo. TimeXtender has really been a key to this new way of working! It made the Analytics Engineer way of working possible for us.

Do you recognize the feeling that your current setup is not enough to realize your ambitions, but your organization is too small for a full data team? Then consider whether working with TimeXtender and Analytics Engineers is something for you.

Want to know more about this approach? Sign up for the live demo or get in touch with our colleagues. E-mergo is happy to think along with you.

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