Intro
A national utility set out to transform how it plans, delivers and governs capital projects across their full lifecycle. The programme aimed to replace fragmented, manual reporting with a unified data ecosystem covering cost, schedule, risk, contract and change management.
Nucleo partnered with the organisation to design and deliver the reporting strategy and data architecture underpinning this transformation, working closely with business and IT stakeholders to turn a complex, multi system landscape into a single trusted source of truth.
The Challenge
The organisation’s project data lived across multiple legacy systems, each with its own structures, definitions and business rules. This created real problems for reporting and decision making:
- Similar data points, such as project costs, timelines and risk indicators, were defined and calculated differently depending on the source system, making comparison and reconciliation difficult
- Reporting relied heavily on manual extraction and transformation, which was slow and prone to error
- Data quality issues, including missing values and duplication, reduced confidence in the numbers stakeholders were working from
- Teams often lacked timely access to accurate insight, which slowed decision making and reduced operational efficiency
The organisation needed a governed, scalable way to bring data together from systems including Unifier, P6, Oracle, RCMS, Copperleaf and Maximo, so that every part of the organisation could work from the same trusted information.
The Solution
Nucleo led the development of the organisation’s reporting strategy and the design of a centralised Azure data mart to support it. This covered:
- Reporting strategy and data strategy: assessing existing information flows to identify gaps and duplication, and co developing a directorate level data strategy aligned with the organisation’s wider enterprise data vision
- Governed data architecture: designing, building and testing a scalable Azure data mart to store project, cost and schedule data for investment planning, risk and cost management reporting on Power BI
- Standardised reporting: aligning reporting structures and data definitions across P6, Oracle EBS, Unifier and Copperleaf, and establishing a monthly reporting cadence delivered automatically through the data mart
- Requirements translation: converting business needs into around 1,000 clearly defined data requirements across four enterprise systems, developed through structured workshops with stakeholders across the business
- Data pipelines: building robust staging layers, data quality frameworks and ETL pipelines to ingest, transform and load data from multiple sources into the centralised data mart, handling complex transformations at scale
- Governance and traceability: facilitating data governance forums, and ensuring complete data lineage and traceability across systems and workstreams to support auditability and confident decision making
Where data issues were identified at source, Nucleo worked directly with system owners, using tools such as Oracle Cloud Integration, to fix problems upstream rather than repeatedly patching them downstream.
The Impact
- Improved data quality and consistency: a centralised Azure data mart, supported by strong data quality frameworks, significantly reduced inconsistencies across previously siloed systems and created one reliable source of truth
- Real time dashboards and better decision making: Power BI dashboards replaced manual, fragmented reporting with near real time, interactive views of key metrics
- Faster delivery through reusable pipelines: scalable, reusable ETL pipelines reduced the time needed to onboard new data sources and deliver new reporting solutions
- Stronger governance and control: data lineage tracking, validation rules and audit mechanisms gave the organisation full traceability from source to report, strengthening accountability and supporting compliance with organisational and regulatory standards