Case Study
How Goodwill of Colorado Built a Future-Proof Data Warehouse
June 6, 2024
2 women thrifting

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Goodwill of Colorado
Goodwill of Colorado| Colorado Springs, CO

Goodwill of Colorado provides career development resources and life-skills training for more than 100,000 Coloradans with disadvantages each year — including military veterans, seniors, youth, and individuals who have a disability or barrier to employment.

Through its thrift stores, donations, corporate partnerships, and recycling processes, Goodwill has worked for over a century to ensure individuals have access to career and life pathways that allow them to live to their fullest potential.

KEY RESULTS

  • Increased operational efficiency
  • User-friendly data model and accurate reporting
  • Cloud infrastructure enabling retirement of on-prem resources
  • Instant access to historical business data
  • Improved/cheaper licensing for wider adoption

Nonprofit

Our professionals help nonprofit organizations navigate challenges and uncover opportunity so you can focus on your mission.

Data Warehousing

Centralize and organize your data into a central source of truth.

By the numbers
Learn more about the client
26k+
job seekers trained and mentored
60+
Colorado counties served
3k+
employees

The Challenge

A merger between organizations created the need for a new data infrastructure and a future-proof reporting system.

Goodwill of Colorado was created after a 2019 merger of Goodwill Industries of Denver and Discover Goodwill of Southern & Western Colorado. The new combined organization needed to move its point of sale (POS) data into a data warehouse to preserve historical records before transitioning to a new POS system.


Additionally, Goodwill of Colorado relied on an end-of-life reporting system, Excel spreadsheets, and Tableau for operational reporting. Without a proper data cleansing process, their reports were time-consuming to create, hard to understand, and did not export correctly.


 

yellow 1
Multiple systems and reporting tools.
    yellow 2
    Time consuming data preparation.
      yellow 3
      Lack of infrastructure to handle past, present, and future data.
        Goodwill Data Flow

        The Solution

        A tailored solution built for the future. Our team worked with Goodwill of Colorado to design a roadmap for the future, allowing them to restructure their data and capture historical data from a system they’d soon be deprecating.

        Analysis & Design
        We conducted internal stakeholder interviews to better understand where the organization was and where they wanted to go. Using this information, we created an informed, multi-phase roadmap to solve their historical data problem and allow for better operational reporting throughout the organization.


        Data Infrastructure
        Our tool-agnostic approach allows us to meet our clients’ needs using the best solutions for their unique situations. We designed a solution for Goodwill of Colorado using technology that will support them long-term, including: Azure Data Factory, DBT, GitHub, Snowflake, and PowerBI.


        Metadata Framework
        We used our metadata framework to automate the flow of data and make it faster for Goodwill of Colorado to connect to sources. Our user-friendly interface for adding data into the repository means their team won’t get bogged down as the business demands increasing amounts of data to be added/centralized. Through this highly repeatable and reusable extract process, we cut down on development time and complexity both up-front and in long-term maintenance. As opposed to 4-5 hours and 100+ lines of code, it will take their team five minutes and one line of code.

        Consulting auditors auditing financial report

        "Eide Bailly worked with us every step of the way to ensure our data infrastructure meets our needs now and will continue to do so in the future."

        -Erik Weitzel, Data Manager | Goodwill of Colorado

        The Results

        A custom, scalable solution designed to provide better reporting and support growth.

        Reports that once took several hours to generate are now available in seconds — which means faster decision-making backed by accurate and reliable data. The new reports are much more valuable because the data can now be generated using the company’s financial formatting standard.


        Goodwill of Colorado is now in a position to easily adapt to future growth. Their new infrastructure also includes cheaper licensing for wider adoption.


        At Eide Bailly, everything we build for our clients belongs to our clients. We’ve ensured both the technical team and end-users at Goodwill of Colorado are trained on their solution and can support it long-term. “Eide Bailly didn't just build our data infrastructure,” says Director of IT Shawn Davis. “They took the time to ensure our technical team and our end-users understand the solution and can continue to support it in the future.”

         

        WHAT CLIENTS ARE SAYING
        Our data drives our decision-making. Eide Bailly's solution has made it easier and faster for our people to access the information they need, when they need it.
        Shawn Davis
        Director of ITGoodwill of Colorado
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