Barrios takes analytics to new heights

Barrios is a woman-owned small business with nearly 45 years of expertise in supporting aerospace programs with high-quality engineering, operations, and technology integration solutions. Known for its contributions to NASA’s Johnson and Marshall Space Flight Centers, the company is also a key player in the commercial spaceflight sector.

In the complex, high-stakes world of aerospace, accurate analytics are mission-critical. Barrios has made its mark with innovative solutions that help their clients achieve stratospheric (and beyond!) success. The team came to Sisense ready to transform their data processes for more advanced insights—to benefit both their business and their clients.

Addressing data availability and integrity issues

Before implementing Sisense, Barrios had relied heavily on manual analytics processes, including Excel workbooks with macro-enabled functionalities. With multiple analysts extracting data from disparate sources, the process was slow and resource-intensive. Worse, the silos resulted in inconsistent data across teams.

Devin Vyain, Solutions Architect at Barrios says, “In many cases, Excel workbooks were not connected to any primary data source, leading to manual data entry or copying and pasting from web applications or desktop databases. This often resulted in discrepancies when different team members pulled data at different times, compromising the value of the analysis.”

The resulting issues had serious repercussions. Discrepancies in boardroom presentations eroded trust in the data. Localized data storage on individual machines impeded collaboration and created bottlenecks in data availability. Ultimately, Barrios couldn’t unlock the full business value of their data.

The Barrios team tried building custom applications to solve the problem, but it was resource-intensive and couldn’t keep up with their growing needs. Vyain and the team knew they needed a tool to centralize their data, improve data integrity, and make insights accessible in real time across the organization—as well as to clients.

Thus, the search was on for a modern, scalable analytics solution.

Charting a course toward actionable analytics

Barrios began their expedition by identifying three key priorities for an analytics solution: ease of use for dashboard designers, advanced access control features, and support for both on-premises and cloud deployments. As they proceeded with comprehensive evaluations of vendors (including more traditional BI platforms like Power BI and Tableau), it became clear that Sisense not only satisfied their current needs, but also positioned them for ongoing success as they grew. With expertise in a broad variety of software platforms, Barrios identified Sisense as the right fit for this endeavor.

Regarding ease of use and composability, Vyain said, “Our data designers and dashboard designers needed a platform they could implement without a steep learning curve, and the intuitive Sisense interface enabled them to build analytics quickly. That, combined with its extensive white-labeling controls, made it a clear choice for our use case.”

The Sisense platform immediately stood out for its customization capabilities and ability to integrate seamlessly into the team’s workflows. In addition, Barrios realized that the cost-effective licensing model was suited well to their long-term scalability goals.

Smart solutions for key business needs

Vyain shares his insights on why Sisense emerged as the platform that could propel the company’s analytics to new heights:

• Security and access: “Granular access control was critical for us. The ability to manage user-level data access securely was a key differentiator that Sisense offered.”
• Ability to scale (with flexible pricing): “Sisense’s support for Linux server architecture and its flexible licensing model were attractive, particularly because we envisioned future scalability that other platforms couldn’t match.”

Features that fuel success

By choosing Sisense, Barrios ensured they had a robust analytics platform that could support their evolving needs and deliver value internally—as well as to their clients. And because Sisense could integrate seamlessly into their tech stack, Barrios realized immediate value from key platform benefits:

• Streamlined data modeling: The ElastiCube Data Hub simplifies ETL processes, enabling analysts to focus on delivering insights rather than preparing and processing data.
• Integration flexibility: Sisense supports both on-premises and cloud architectures, aligning with Barrios’ strategic objectives and workflow needs.
• Data security and access controls: Advanced features like row-level security ensure data governance across multi-tenant deployments.
• Customizable visualizations: With the robust Sisense SDKs, Barrios can bring powerful analytics directly to their clients with white-labeled dashboards tailored to their users’ needs.

Achieving lift-off on operational efficiencies

Implementing Sisense catalyzed a pivotal shift at Barrios. With their cumbersome legacy processes a thing of the past, the time that had once been spent wrangling data is now freed up to actually put that data to use. And with the old data silos broken down, everyone in the organization could access real-time, accurate insights.

Improved efficiency

With over 100 Sisense dashboards now providing real-time insights to the Barrios team, manual data preparation, inaccuracies, and cumbersome in-house development are a thing of the past.

Vyain says, “We went from custom application development to the ability to rapidly change something on the dashboard and then publish it again in real time within the production environment—without sacrificing any of the security. That really helped us level up.”

Enhanced collaboration

Centralized data has enabled consistent metrics across departments and ensured users in every role could quickly derive relevant insights. Early on, Barrios identified power users who could build dashboards for their departments and use them to communicate key insights to leaders. The result was streamlined communication and collaboration, with everyone tapping into data for their specific use case.

“We have large data stores that speak to many different areas of the customer data set,” Vyain notes. “They’re pulled into Sisense and integrated with each other—that empowers analysts to get straight to the data that they know has already been transformed to fit the use case. And the built-in interactivity of the dashboards makes it usable for leads and management—they love the fact that they can go to the dashboard and see the data they need with just a click.”

Streamlined reporting

With accurate, real-time insights at their fingertips, the Barrios team now spends less time processing data and more time making confident, data-driven decisions. Board meetings no longer require hours of preparation or prolonged discussions to sort out reporting inconsistencies.

“With Sisense, we connected to our Jira data store and designed a set of dashboards that update automatically and replace PowerPoint reporting from Jira,” says Vyain. “This streamlined our board meetings and reduced meeting time by 50%.”

Empowered teams

At the outset, only Barrios’ technical teams implemented Sisense. But in a matter of months, non-technical managers and even external stakeholders were eager to tap into the platform’s benefits. The user-friendly Sisense interface allowed for rapid adoption across all levels of the organization.

“Initially, the technical people were using Sisense. From there, it expanded to leads or supervisors who wanted to see an aggregation of their team’s data,” Vyain says. “Then, it went up to presenting data to customers, which sparked questions like, ‘Hey, could we have access to these dashboards as well?’”

Opening new frontiers for business growth

Sisense has not only optimized Barrios’ internal operations, but also created new opportunities for business growth.

Barrios realized that the capabilities enabled by Sisense could provide value to their clients and open up new revenue streams. They seized on the ability to rapidly prototype and deploy analytics solutions in client deliverables—opening the door to more bidding opportunities and winning new client contracts. This ability to quickly adapt dashboards and build scalable analytics solutions positions Barrios as an innovative leader in the complex, high-stakes world of aerospace analytics.

“Now that we’ve built out one use case and gained a lot of familiarity with Sisense we can really quickly roll that out for different customers as well,” Vyain says. “We have actually derived additional revenue specifically from providing this data solution approach, which involves Sisense as the front end.”

Launching into a data-driven future

Partnering with Sisense has revolutionized Barrios’ approach to analytics, replacing fragmented processes with a unified, automated system. They’re now fully leveraging their data as a business asset, both for internal operations and strategic growth. For Barrios, the Sisense platform has not only addressed immediate challenges, but it also paved the way for innovating at maximum velocity into the future.

Underlying it all is a profound culture shift in the organization—fueled by an API-first platform that empowers teams to turn data into a competitive advantage. As Vyain reflects, “The adoption of Sisense has changed the way our colleagues and executive leadership think about data challenges and opportunities. It has helped us create a common language for addressing these across all levels of the company.”

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