At Soliant, we’re passionate about helping our clients harness the full potential of their data. We are especially excited about our latest offering: business intelligence solutions powered by Amazon QuickSight. This versatile analytics tool is quickly helping our clients transform the way they can visualize, understand, and access their data.
Amazon QuickSight is a highly scalable, serverless, AI-integrated business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. Integrated within the ecosystem of AWS, it allows for the creation of interactive dashboards that can be accessed from any device. It communicates seamlessly with a variety of data sources, including the following: Salesforce, Claris FileMaker, AWS data sources, SQL, Snowflake, and various SaaS applications. QuickSight offers flexible pricing for a wide range of features, including interactive dashboarding, data scenario exploration tools, scheduled reporting, forecasts, data threshold alerts, and a robust security layer.
Visualizing your data
With QuickSight, users can create, access, and share custom dashboards and reports that provide rich visualizations of data where they can filter, drill down, and explore various data sets. Using these dashboards, they can set up alerts, create scheduled reports, embed visualizations in other apps, among many other features. When paired with Amazon Q, the AWS-native generative AI assistant, QuickSight lets users query their data or generate either a data story or executive summary, facilitating reporting and understanding of the narratives found within a dashboard.
Querying on the fly
Amazon Q is a natural partner for QuickSight. It facilitates natural language querying of your data on the fly, capitalizing on the profound depth of AWS’ large language models. This allows for chat-based data exploration of dashboards using language that is meaningful to your business. Users can explore data quickly and independently, no longer needing to wait on others to generate reports or send information.
You can explore more complex business questions using QuickSight Scenarios, a threaded analysis tool that employs AI to explore various business questions via prompts. Scenarios bring data storytelling to life in one, layered analysis which allows you to choose analytical forks to dive into context-specific sub-questions, perform “what if” analyses, and explore various outcomes. You can dig deeply into your data, anticipate trends, and test strategies – all using natural language through a branching tree of conversational flow.
Extending FileMaker solutions
At Soliant, one exciting application of QuickSight has been its integration with FileMaker solutions. FileMaker data is often siloed, and aggregation can become a pain point in solutions, causing slowdowns in files as you try to summarize large blocks of data. Furthermore, you typically need to build fixed data architecture around each report that you create. As a result, some users see performance hits and start to explore outside technologies, such as Tableau, PowerBI, or even JavaScript libraries, to visualize their data.
With QuickSight, dashboards offer flexible vantage points around your data. It has quickly become a natural extension to FileMaker that transforms the way users understand their data, exploring data from multiple vantage points through the lens of various charts, reports, and AI-driven tools.
Soliant has developed a custom connector within the Soliant.cloud platform that serves as the backbone of the data pipeline to QuickSight. Capitalizing on the serverless AWS architecture, this pipeline streamlines the process of connecting FileMaker data to QuickSight, processes and formats the data for ingestion, and eliminates the need for complex architecture or manual data handling. This allows for a seamless integration of your data with automated refresh intervals that are tailored to your needs, keeping your data current and accessible.
Empowering clients to understand their data
There are numerous QuickSight features that have enabled our clients to research and interpret their data across varying sources. Even in the early stages of adoption, our clients have realized a wide range of benefits:
- Predictive insights: With QuickSight’s advanced analytics, our clients are forecasting outcomes, such as estimating project approval dates based on historical trends.
- Faster answers: Clients are asking questions and receiving answers in real time, using dashboards tailored to their specific needs.
- Improved data quality: QuickSight has helped clients uncover and address inconsistencies in their FileMaker data, prompting valuable cleanup efforts.
- Scalable architecture: With an AWS-backed infrastructure, clients are scaling their analytics capabilities without worrying about performance or maintenance.
- Flexible deployment: Straightforward dashboard versioning allows for agile iteration and minimal disruptions as we deploy new features.
Showcasing client success stories
As we continue to build custom BI solutions for clients, we plan to showcase some of our clients’ success stories, lessons learned, and how they have gotten the most out of QuickSight’s powerful features. Some of these use cases will demonstrate the quick wins that our clients have obtained by adopting QuickSight within their organizations.
As we prepare to spotlight these stories in the coming months, we’ve compiled a list of use case examples – some of which are already being explored by our clients:
- Process Bottleneck Identification – Pinpoint process slowdowns for projects with tight deadlines and understand what it takes to get from one milestone to the next.
- Job Cost Analysis & Profitability – Compare estimated costs with actual expenses, track trends in cost overruns, and identify high-margin jobs
- Material Cost Analysis – Monitor material usage across projects to anticipate future needs and optimize purchasing.
- Customer Analysis – Analyze customer data by type, location, value, and renewal rates to focus on high-retention opportunities.
- Sales Pipeline & Quote Conversion – Track leads, quotes sent, and conversion rates, identifying trends based on reps, services, and seasonal patterns.
- Seasonal Trends & Forecasting – Determine peak seasons for various types of work and plan staffing, marketing, and procurement strategies.
- Custom Reporting – Generate tailored reports to support business decisions, from profitability to workforce efficiency
Why Soliant?
At Soliant, we embrace a culture of innovation and are invested in your success to help shape and empower your innovative tech solutions. Our Advanced Tier partnership with AWS provides a foundation to simplify the adoption of revolutionary and transformative technologies.
We can help you break out of fragmented technology ecosystems, creating connected data insights that were previously unobtainable. We have developed a streamlined data pipeline to connect data from FileMaker to QuickSight, removing frequently encountered barriers with other common business intelligence tools.
Finally, we love building out and integrating technologies in collaboration with our clients. Our deep bench in AWS, FileMaker, Salesforce, and custom web applications allows us to be uniquely positioned to tackle any business need with creativity and out-of-the-box ideas.
What’s next?
As we continue to implement QuickSight solutions, we’re focused on refining our processes, sharing best practices, and helping clients move from proof-of-concept to production.
If you’re curious about how Soliant can help your organization unlock the power of your data with QuickSight, we’d love to talk. Whether you’re just starting your analytics journey or looking to take it to the next level, we’re here to help.
