Employee recognition & rewards
Replacing Sisense with a BI layer they own
Sisense replaced by a customised Superset the client owns outright, on rebuilt pipelines and a purpose-built analytical warehouse — embedded back into their own product, at CAD 600k below the licensed alternative in year one.
Client
A Canadian employee recognition and rewards platform
$600k
CAD below the licensed alternative, year one
The challenge
What was in the way
Recognition data is part of what the platform sells. HR teams and executives buy it partly for what it can tell them about participation, budget and culture — and that reporting ran on Sisense.
Licensed BI sits badly underneath a product whose own customers are the audience: every additional viewer is a cost line, and the quotes for the obvious alternatives scaled the same way.
The pipelines feeding it had grown by accretion. Numbers arrived slower than the questions did, and no one owned the definitions behind them.
The solution
What we built
We replaced Sisense with Apache Superset, customised well past default and deployed on infrastructure the client owns outright — no per-seat licence, and no vendor sitting between them and their own analytics.
The data engineering layer underneath was redesigned and rebuilt rather than ported across: ingestion from the operational systems, an analytical warehouse modelled around the questions the business actually asks, and orchestration with automated flows so the numbers arrive without anyone running anything by hand.
The existing dashboards were migrated and rebuilt rather than reproduced from screenshots, with the metric definitions settled on the way through — the migration was the moment to agree what each number meant.
The result is embedded back into the client’s own platform. The analytics their customers see is a surface we built and they own, not a third-party panel bolted to the side of the product.
Key technologies
- BI
- Apache Superset — customised, embedded in the client’s product
- Warehouse
- Purpose-built analytical model over the platform’s operational data
- Pipelines
- Rebuilt ingestion and transformation, orchestrated and scheduled
- Replaced
- Sisense, and the licensed alternatives costed against it
Impact & results
CAD 600,000 below the licensed alternative in year one
Measured against the commercial BI it replaced and the quotes that would have succeeded it.
Analytics as a product surface
Embedded inside the client’s own platform rather than living beside it.
Pipelines rebuilt, not ported
A warehouse modelled on the questions asked, with the definitions written down.
Owned outright
No per-seat licence between the client and their own data.
Start here
Start with a problem, not a brief.
Tell us what is slow, what is manual, what is stalled, or what nobody understands any more. We will tell you honestly whether it is worth building.