CASE STUDY
How Montgomery Homes Gained 15% Workforce Efficiency with Automated Employee Productivity Dashboard
AT A GLANCE
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Client: Montgomery Homes
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Industry: Construction & Real Estate
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Location: NSW, Australia
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Solution: Employee Productivity & Performance Dashboard
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Key Impact: 15% efficiency improvement, 8-10 hours/week saved
Background
Montgomery Homes operates with over 200 employees across construction sites, design centers, and corporate offices throughout NSW. The company had invested in workforce productivity tracking through insightful.ai, aiming to better understand workforce analytics and utilization across different teams and departments.
However, having this tool installed was only the first step. The real challenge was turning the raw productivity data into actionable business intelligence that could drive performance improvements and enable data-driven decision making.
The Challenge
Montgomery's HR and management teams faced a significant reporting burden. While Insightful.ai captured comprehensive employee productivity data, the platform's native reporting capabilities didn't provide the strategic insights needed for effective workforce management.
Managers relied on fragmented reports that limited their ability to identify productivity trends, coach staff effectively, or rebalance workloads. The manual process of extracting and analyzing data consumed 8 to 10 hours weekly, yet still produced performance metrics that lacked the depth and visualization needed for quick decision-making.
The company struggled to compare team performance fairly across different departments. Without normalized metrics and trend analysis, managers couldn't distinguish between temporary productivity variations and actual performance issues requiring intervention.
The company also lacked visibility into engagement patterns over time. They could see current logged hours but couldn't easily analyze weekly trends, monthly comparisons, or identify which applications drove productivity versus distraction. Teams had no way to track utilization percentages, engagement trends, or benchmark performance across departments.
The Solution
GrowthBI developed a fully automated Power BI dashboard that transformed raw Insightful.ai data into strategic workforce intelligence. The solution used Azure Data Factory for API ingestion and pipeline automation, SQL Server for structured storage and business logic enforcement, and Power BI for construction industry visualization of key metrics.
The system automatically processed productivity metrics to ensure fair performance comparisons and trend analysis.
The workforce analytics dashboard delivered several critical capabilities:
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Company Overview Dashboard: Real-time KPIs including Work Time, Active Time, Productive Time, Utilization percentage, and Engagement percentage with week-over-week and month-over-month comparisons.
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Team Performance Analysis: Weekly and daily views of employee productivity metrics by team, with the ability to drill down to individual performance while maintaining privacy through role-level security that ensures managers only see their own team's data.
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Trend Analysis & Comparisons: Week-to-date comparisons, prior week analysis, and rolling 4-week averages that showed productivity trends over time, helping identify both improving and declining patterns. Monthly trend visualizations enabled strategic workforce planning.
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Application Analytics: Identification of top productive applications and teams, showing where employees spend the most time and which tools drive efficiency versus distraction.
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Top Performers Recognition: Automated identification of outstanding performers and those needing additional support, enabling proactive management intervention.
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Power Automate ensured scheduled PDF delivery of team-specific dashboards to managers, eliminating manual report generation while keeping leadership informed with regular updates tailored to their teams.
Results
The automated Power BI solution eliminated 8 to 10 hours of manual reporting work each week. More importantly, it created a single source of truth for workforce analytics that managers could trust and act upon.
Workforce efficiency improved by 15% through accurate engagement and utilization insights. Managers could now identify and address productivity issues quickly, coach staff based on real data trends, and rebalance workloads to prevent burnout or underutilization.
Key performance outcomes included:
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100% accuracy improvement by eliminating manual errors
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6 days per month saved on reporting and data consolidation
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15% improvement in workforce efficiency
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Daily refresh of metrics via automated API integration
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Clear visibility on apps, teams, and productivity trends
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Proactive management through trend analysis and early warning indicators
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Enhanced privacy with role-level security ensuring teams only see relevant data
The business intelligence dashboard revealed previously hidden insights: which teams showed declining engagement trends over time, which applications truly drove productivity, and where workload imbalances existed. The comprehensive trend analysis enabled managers to spot patterns early and intervene before small issues became major problems.
Managers across all departments now had access to fair, accurate employee performance data with rich visualizations showing trends, comparisons, and benchmarks. The automated weekly email delivery meant every team leader received their team's performance metrics without having to request reports or wait for HR to compile data.
The implementation of role-level security was particularly valuable, ensuring that each manager could only access their own team's detailed data while still seeing company-wide aggregated metrics for benchmarking purposes.
Looking Forward
Montgomery Homes now runs regular productivity reviews using the Power BI dashboard as their single source of truth. The comprehensive trend analysis and comparison features have transformed how managers approach performance management, leading to more productive coaching conversations and better resource allocation decisions.
The success of this implementation has positioned Montgomery to expand their performance analytics to include project-based productivity tracking and customer satisfaction correlations, creating an even more comprehensive view of workforce effectiveness.
Interested in the technical architecture? Read our technical deep-dive to learn how we integrated Insightful.ai APIs with Power BI to create a comprehensive workforce analytics solution.