For a lot of companies, the biggest obstacle to better reporting isn't the technology. It's headcount.
That's the pattern Jasper Peetsma keeps running into. As a Data Management Consultant at Victa Business Intelligence, he helps customers build data warehouses and turn them into reports and dashboards. Before he started working with Timextender, he says the same problem showed up again and again: "The biggest data challenge we were facing were mostly customers that just have a really small team, or one or maybe two, sometimes not even any BI employees, to build the data warehouse."
Victa works with multiple platforms and helps customers figure out which one fits, but Timextender has become one of Jasper's specialties for a specific reason: it lets his team build something and hand it off without follow-up work.
"We would help the employees build a data warehouse, and Timextender really accelerates that process" - Jasper Peetsma
That handoff is central to how Victa works. "We first deliver a data warehouse, and then the customer would continue building on it after we're basically finished with our job," Jasper explains. For a customer with little or no in-house data team, that's the difference between a warehouse nobody maintains after the consultants leave and one the customer keeps developing on their own.
Before Timextender, Jasper says a lot of Victa's customers were assembling reports manually in Excel or connecting Power BI straight to their source database, an approach that gets slow fast once you start filtering in the front end. Timextender's metadata-driven approach changes that.
"Because Timextender is metadata-driven, you really have to concentrate on the structure of your data. You get all that structured data in one place. It's already prepared before it goes to Power BI, so that really helps in getting insights quickly." - Jasper Peetsma
That structure is also what makes the handoff work. A customer inheriting a warehouse built on ad hoc Excel sheets or a direct database connection has little to actually maintain. A customer inheriting a metadata-driven, structured warehouse has something they can keep building on themselves, which is exactly the outcome Victa is aiming for.
At Bolletje, a five-person IT team couldn't keep up with growing demand for reporting and analytics on its own. After moving to a new ERP system, the company's entire reporting setup had to be rebuilt from scratch, and off-the-shelf tools didn't hold up. Victa and Timextender helped them consolidate data into one structured warehouse, which the Bolletje team now runs and extends themselves.
At FM Group, the challenge was complexity rather than headcount. The company's BI team had built more than 25 dashboards and was distributing 600 reports a night, but a growing number of data sources was stretching development cycles and making the environment harder to maintain. Companies expecting more data sources or more visualization tools down the line should build a structured warehouse now, before that complexity catches up with them. FM Group centralized its source systems in Timextender so Power BI and Qlik could both work from the same structured data instead of duplicating effort across tools.
For Jasper, success isn't just getting a customer's data warehouse built, it's what happens after Victa's team moves on. That throughline runs across every one of these engagements, whether it's a five-person IT team at a bakery or an established BI function distributing hundreds of reports a night: build the foundation once, hand it off, and let the customer keep extending it long after the project ends.
"We first deliver a data warehouse, and then the customer would continue building on it after we're basically finished with our job." — Jasper Peetsma
Want to learn more about how Timextender can convert your data into insights?
Want to deliver this for your own customers?
Victa is one of many partners who use Timextender to help customers with limited data resources move faster, without leaving them dependent on outside help once the project ends. If that's a problem your customers face too, find out what it takes to become a Timextender partner. Learn more →