‘Getting inside the data’ at IT Weapons

IT Weapons is the national IT services division of Konica Minolta Canada. The company is growing fast, with more than 140 people working from offices in major centers across Canada. One of the challenges in managing that growth, says Mike Dabner, IT Weapons’ Director, Knowledge Management, has been ‘getting inside the data’.

A ConnectWise partner since 2008, IT Weapons invested early in people and technology to  create dashboards and visualizations to really empower staff with the insights they needed to help manage their teams. “But we hit a ceiling,” Dabner recalls. “With so much data to sift through, we were overwhelmed.”

A meeting at ConnectWise’s IT Nation Connect Conference led Dabner to Cognition360.

“Cognition360 has been the key to helping us break through the ceiling,” Dabner says. “Very quickly we had a data warehouse optimized for ConnectWise, with a library of Power BI reports which are easy to customize. Now we can really get inside the data and get the information our people are asking for.

“Our key data is now accessible and accurate. Cognition360’s reports are organized into neat ‘buckets’ and designed to be easy to build on for all key areas of the business. Our people are empowered to make predictions, get new insights and make correlations that otherwise were not easily visible.

“There are huge time savings. We now have KPIs properly defined and can track those KPIs and change quickly. Goodbye Excel spreadsheets.

“Working with Cognition360 is great. What’s nice is that Cognition360 is a partner, not just a vendor. We want to be partners with our clients and we want the same relationship with our vendors. We’ve had some challenging customization requests and I have to say that Cognition360’s Eamon Magan is a superstar – he really is,” Dabner said.