Samir Ballal

· Led a cross-functional team of nine members in the development of insightful Tableau dashboards that aligned with business objectives and user requirements.

· Collaborated with internal stakeholders and third-party partners to orchestrate BI solutions, addressing key business challenges and delivering actionable insights.

· Spearheaded the design and implementation of an ETL and visualisation solution, consolidating multiple legacy reports into meaningful dashboards to support significant business transformations.

· Conducted strategic data analysis to identify and rectify major sales leakage areas, enabling optimisation of sales processes.

· Analysed Salesforce opportunity-to-sale conversion funnels to pinpoint and rectify drop-offs in member acquisition stages, in line with business growth objectives.

· Pioneered the development and implementation of a semantic layer within the data warehouse, enhancing data consistency and optimizing Tableau reporting capabilities.

· Leveraged deep domain expertise to drive user adoption and promoted data literacy across the organisation as a trusted advisor on BI solutions and metrics.

· Mentored team members and business power users on best practices for impactful visualisations, while adhering to enterprise design guidelines and standards for Tableau.

· Conducted showcases and workshops to promote Tableau self-service among business teams, fostering effective data usage and comprehension.

· Partnered with SMEs and business users to gather business rules and dashboard requirements, steering the design and development of customized reporting and analytics solutions.

· Automated a labour-intensive manual sales allocation process, achieving a 90% reduction in processing time and enhancing operational efficiency.

· Designed and executed ETL processes and data solutions using AWS and Snowflake, ensuring alignment with business rules and objectives.

· Collaborated with business stakeholders to establish critical business rules for various data projects, ensuring clarity and alignment with business goals.

· Teamed up with marketing departments to provide essential data for ongoing member communication and targeted campaigns, bolstering business growth and engagement.

· Directed the development, enhancement, and support of pivotal organisational applications like the Loyalty System to guarantee a seamless member experience.

· Created and implemented a data pipeline from Salesforce to the legacy warehouse, enabling continuous reporting during transition phases and ensuring business continuity.

· Instituted and oversaw a comprehensive data masking strategy across multiple project teams to protect sensitive customer information, bolstering data security and compliance with privacy regulations.

• Developed, implemented and optimized stored procedures and functions using T-SQL.
• Designed and implemented TSQL queries for reporting and complex solution development.
• Devised high-quality database solutions ranging in size and complexity, increasing productivity and improving data sharing.
• Improved application performance by determining root cause of issues and resolving.
• Followed standard practices for migrating changes to test and production environments and provided technology support to meet business requirements.
• Analyzed existing SQL queries to identify opportunities for improvements.
• Maintained complex T-SQL queries, views and stored procedures in multi-database environment with little supervision.
• Analyzed complex SQL installations to help plan data extraction and processing tasks, aiding in eventual deployments.
• Produced high-standard database solutions to meet stability, reliability and performance metrics.
• Developed custom database objects, stored procedures and delivered application support.

· Designed and implemented a comprehensive database for the organisation's customer loyalty program, integrating with CRM, website, and mobile app platforms to harness data insights and optimise program effectiveness.

· Led requirements gathering sessions with regional sales leaders and developed a Cognos reporting solution for sales lead performance, delivering vital insights that shaped key strategic decisions.

· Created an ETL solution in SSIS, employing T-SQL to manage intricate rules for determining customer loyalty tiers and offer eligibility, and established automated processes to initiate Cognos Transformer cube refresh upon ETL load completion.

· Launched a customised homepage within the Cognos portal, showcasing real-time status updates on data loads, cube refreshes, and ETL batch processes in a calendar format, augmented with a news ticker using Javascript, to enhance monitoring and notification capabilities for daily Cognos reports and cube refresh activities.

· Engineered intricate Cognos reports to scrutinise policy lapse rates and pinpoint exceptions, empowering the business to swiftly identify discrepancies in source data and implement timely corrective measures.

· Led a team to rectify the data loading processes from a large number of MS Access tables to Teradata database tables using Fastload and Multiload utilities.

· Devised an automated solution for Chart of Account hierarchy and master data loads, significantly reducing the weekly load cycle time.

· Developed and implemented an automated solution to generate monthly scorecards for the Head of Finance, cutting the turnaround time from half a day to just half an hour.

· Strategised and designed a solution for Westpac’s offshore users in Asian countries, aligning with the organisation-wide Cognos analysis cubes.

· Integrated the monthly trial balance data from a newly acquired bank into Westpac’s data warehouse, ensuring seamless reporting during the acquisition and transition phases.

· Conducted requirements gathering workshops with business users to define report layouts and KPIs

· Led an offshore team to implement a very high visibility EDW that streamlined the ETL process from JD Edwards system to the data warehouse resulting in consistent data flow to each downstream application.

· Liaised with third party vendor to gather downstream vendor managed application’s data requirements

· Did As-Is analysis and strategized the migration of Customer’s Supply Reporting pack from organization’s statutory reporting platform-HFM to management reporting platform-Cognos.

· Built Cognos Framework Manager dimensional model and complex Report Studio reports for reports migration from HFM to Cognos

· Successfully implemented efficient techniques to update saved prompt parameters in Cognos Report Views using a combination of Cognos SDK tool and Excel macros.

· Setup an efficient and standard process to update thousands of Analysis Studio reports that arise due to the changes in organization’s Product and Customer hierarchy using the Cognos DRU (Dynamic Report Specification Updater) tool.

· Conceptualized and built techniques to deliver monthly report pack in excel on Cognos portal that involved use of Cognos jobs, Excel VBA, and DOS batch files.

· Designed and built metadata model and reports for a set of reports to reconcile data between two different systems that significantly reduced the time spent on reconciliation.

· Integrated the Cognos reports with .NET interface to create visually pleasing interface that helped users to initiate month-end load processes and review the data in reports without leaving the web screen.

· Successfully rolled out a cloud based reporting solution in Birst BI tool in Brazil, UAE and India for primary and secondary sales analytics.

· Created attractive dashboards for pre-sales presentation that resulted in winning new project for Infosys.

· Led a team of 5 to develop and support the customer’s management reporting application.

· Designed and built complex Cognos reports for customer’s HR department.

· Defined a 2-layered security structure with data and object level security for the highly sensitive HR Cognos reports.

· Designed and built Cognos Framework Manager model and reports for the Key Performance Indicators in customer’s Supply portfolio.

· Designed and built Cognos Transformer Cube for ad-hoc reporting in Analysis Studio.

· Successfully implemented the Supply KPI reporting in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and United Kingdom.

· Liaised with 3rd Party vendor (Accenture) to define strategy to pull data from SAP into Oracle Database using Informatica.

· Tuned the Extraction Transformation and Loading processes to considerably reduce the data load timings.

· Played a crucial role in delivering a huge set of Cognos reports and Dashboards for the customer’s new BI Competency Centre.

· Setup coding standards and best practices for the Cognos reporting team.

· Mentored new joiners in the team.

· Standardized design document and unit test plans templates that are now used as reference for other projects too.

· Built a large set of reports and dashboards Cognos Report Studio using various out of the box techniques like Prompt Macros to create dynamic Member Unique Names, and use of JavaScript to enhance the visualisation of dashboards.

· Worked in 24 x 6 shifts to support the newly built application.

· Administered Cognos portal for creation and maintenance of dashboard and report tabs, and for access to user active directory groups.

· Built Crosstab Reports in Cognos 7.3 Impromptu.

· Migrated Cognos 7.3 Reports to Cognos 8.1.

· Built new Crosstab and List Reports in Cognos 8.1.

· Devised a technique to create multiple reports with minimal difference in minimal time using XML code.

· Created sample formats for new reports that helped users in finalizing reports layouts.

· Created views and queries for use in Framework Manager model.

· Coordinated with onsite lead to gather requirements and to provide regular status updates.