Case Study - Ripple Operations Enhances LMS with Rich Power BI Reports and Visualizations

Ripple Operations is a leading eLearning technology and services provider offering solutions for the specific needs of the maritime industry. Through technology and expertise, they help operators gain visibility on crew training, improve learning outcomes, increase safety and optimize performance in maritime operations.

Their web-based learning management system revolutionizes on-board training by dynamically adapting content based on vessel and route, while providing seamless learning experiences both on land and at sea independent of connectivity.

The Challenge

One of the most requested features for Ripple LMS was to make assessment and compliance data accessible through rich interactive reports and visualizations. Ripple Operations decided to leverage Microsoft's analytics platform to empower their customers to combine learning data with their other corporate data sources, create and share insights with the entire organization, and make data-driven decisions.

This ambitious goal presented a few challenges. First, the high degree of customization provided by Ripple LMS meant that each customer's dataset had different dimensions, making it difficult to build a single set of reports and visualizations for all customers. Second, the solution had to meet critical multi-tenant and multi-geography data isolation requirements due to the global nature of their maritime clientele.

Our Solution

To address these challenges, Ripple Operations partnered with Aligned for expert assistance. Our team thoroughly assessed the intricate landscape of Power BI licensing, and identified the most optimal and cost-effective options to address company's needs.

Automation was a significant component of the solution. Aligned fully automated the provisioning of multi-tenant and multi-geography environments, streamlining the setup and customer onboarding process.

To alleviate the complexity of the source learning data set, Aligned exposed a simplified analytical data model that retained the essence of their complex needs while making report and visualization authoring more manageable. Additionally, customers’ reporting environments were fully isolated to maintain data integrity and regulatory compliance.

Our collaboration also included knowledge-sharing sessions to enable the Ripple Operations team to be self-sufficient in managing and extending their new Azure data pipelines and Power BI reporting capabilities.

The Result

As a result of the partnership with Aligned, Ripple Operations now operates cost-effective and secure environments that fully meet their specialized reporting requirements. The implementation created the flexibility to allocate resources commensurate with each customer's size, as well as the ability to automatically scale up or down to meet reporting workload patterns and reduce costs.

Importantly, our solution created a way for future extensions, such as customer-facing data marts for advanced use cases. The skills and expertise acquired by the Ripple Operations team during our engagement have become invaluable assets for their future projects.