Home Group’s data-centric shift for SDR reporting
It’s 22 May 2015 and I’m in a meeting room with my team mate, on our tenth hour of our working day. The table in the middle of the room is piled high with snacks, junk food and soft drinks. I’m simultaneously trying to organise a lift on the phone, put on some make-up and continue working. I was supposed to be leaving for my Dad’s birthday dinner an hour ago but our SDR is due in a week and we’re still not ready.
This was the reality of doing the SDR back then. I’ve been compiling this return since 2013, back when it was all Excel, all the time.
Down to the wire
We would start in April, sequestered in that same meeting room, me and a couple of colleagues with our table of snacks that we’d brought in to maintain a sense of sanity. Most of our working days were 10-12 hours during those two months. We’d often be working weekends and over the May bank holidays, and everything was a spreadsheet. So. Many. Spreadsheets. And even with all that time and effort, our submissions were down to the wire every time.
Jump forward a decade or so to last year and it couldn’t be more different. Whenever the SDR is submitted, I treat myself to a meal out as a ‘well done’ for getting it over the line. This year, I was sitting in a lovely local Italian restaurant at the beginning of May, having already submitted our return, and without a single hour of overtime needed.
So how did I go from two months of 12-hour days, weekends filled with the SDR and holidays being little more than a dream, to getting back a month of my time while still successfully delivering our essential annual return?
Two-pronged approach
In 2020, I was promoted to the position of data analytics manager at Home Group, leading a team of developers, analysts and data engineers to provide reporting and analytics across the business. The SDR is just one of the many things we deliver as a team. In a year where just getting through the day was difficult for most of us, I decided to make this one thing a lot less difficult.
At the time, there were several key challenges within our organisation that were contributing factors to a difficult SDR collation:
- Data management – while most of our data was in our main housing management system, a big chunk of it was on spreadsheets maintained by departments with little or no visibility of how the data interacted with the rest of the business.
- Communication – of all of the departments involved, there was little communication or understanding of how or why data and processes flowed from one to the other.
- Manual data collation – the aforementioned forest of (you guessed it) spreadsheets.
This boiled down to two simultaneous streams of work – our technology and our culture.
Data as culture
Part of the change I wanted to push was accountability for and ownership of our data, so the whole piece would become a challenge we took on collectively rather than as well-intentioned individuals. As such, I contacted representatives from each department and set up monthly meetings to discuss and review the SDR data.
This has been a real game-changer. Departments are now talking to each other and setting up splinter groups to tackle specific problems. They’ve identified opportunities to improve processes as well as realising the impact and importance of the data they’re separately responsible for and where it overlaps.
Working in data often means feeling removed from having any direct impact on our customers’ lives; an unexpected benefit of bringing so many departments together to work on our SDR meant that we saw how a small change could positively impact our customer experience. Improving our process flows around sales and legal information means better efficiency for those teams, easier access to key data and less waiting time for customers when it comes to buying or staircasing their property.
Data as technology
The biggest technology shift that we’ve made in the data space has been our move away from sourcing our reporting data from disparate systems and data stored on spreadsheets. Within the past five years, I co-ordinated the implementation of our data lakehouse, with the goal of using that as the source of all our data and reporting.
This goes hand-in-hand with our launch of Power BI as our main reporting tool. The combined functionality of the two, alongside our SDR expertise, has meant that the collation of our SDR data is now 85 per cent automated.
This shifts us from a reactive to a proactive footing. Rather than waiting until the end of March to start checking and confirming our numbers, Home Group’s various departments can review our year-to-date position at any point during the year. Any anomalies can be tackled at the point of occurrence instead of retrospectively, allowing for better education and process adherence. Most importantly, it means that there are no surprises when it comes to our final SDR submission.
Where next?
Onwards and upwards! We still have more process improvements to make, both culturally and technologically. Our next year or so looks like:
- Continuing to examine our processes because we know we have gaps and scope to improve.
- Carrying on integrating data into our lakehouse.
- Adding further automations, such as developing our application for external agencies to submit their data to us for our SDR return.
On a personal note, I celebrated a big birthday this May so I took two weeks off and went to Italy. In May. Here’s to never having to work on my birthday ever again!
Laura Hetherington is the data analytics manager at Home Group.
