The University of Oxford is perhaps the most renowned educational institution in the world. When they sought to upgrade their financial reporting capabilities with Tableau, InterWorks was honored to assist them and rose to the challenge.

Case Study

We think we’re the best at what we do, but why take our word for it? Here’s one of our case studies to prove the point:

University of Oxford Financial Reporting Project

The University of Oxford is probably the most famous teaching establishment in the world producing some of the finest scholars and successful individuals. When the University wanted to upgrade their financial reporting InterWorks were honored to assist them.

The project involved connecting to their new financial data source whilst maintaining the integrity of the historic data for year on year comparison. This was no easy task as the data sources had very different formats.  The University of Oxford’s IT team did an incredible job aligning the old data with the new as there are always intricacies, challenges and obstacles to overcome.  Once they had aligned the two data sources we were able to smooth out the remaining differences using Tableau.

The reporting itself involved recreating some of the existing reports which were used within the Finance Department as well as creating new reports to achieve a better understanding of the University’s Spend and identify potential savings.  The Finance Department itself is very forward thinking and embraced a Business Intelligence approach to reporting throughout. This meant that we were able to leverage some very powerful reporting techniques such as 80/20 pareto analysis and price banding.

Upgrading to a new system, particularly a financial system, can be an overwhelming idea. The University of Oxford now have all the benefits of their new front end whilst maintaining their original data for comparison.  The whole process was completed with minimal disruption to the end user and has maintained their usual Tableau reporting interface with old data smoothly transitioning into new data with little indication that the data source is different.

“We now have interactive up-to-date reports that show a story rather than just a photo of a single point in time.  Not only did InterWorks save us time in having to write the reports ourselves, they made them better than we would have been able to do.”

– Emma May (University of Oxford Finance Division)