The Kilpatrick Group (TKG) is a leader in the pre-need insurance market, delivering monthly reporting to a large base of funeral home customers. When Madison Ave took over the Tableau work, that reporting cycle was failing month after month. The workbooks looked functional on the surface but sat on top of deep technical debt, undocumented requirements, and no formal QA. Madison Ave stabilized the environment, rebuilt the reporting architecture on a documented foundation, and gave leadership dashboards they could finally depend on.
The Challenge
TKG had inherited what the team came to call a “ball of string.” Previous efforts had left behind significant technical debt, and the monthly reporting cycle had become a source of constant angst. The problems compounded each other:
- Hidden technical deficiencies. Workbooks that appeared to work had deep-rooted architecture issues underneath, surfacing as failures only at publication time.
- Undocumented requirements. There was no technical documentation for the data filters, queries, or dynamic formatting that the reports depended on.
- No QA process. Tableau workbooks and data extracts had no formal vetting, so every month meant another round of band-aid fixes instead of a stable release.
The Solution
Madison Ave pivoted the engagement from reactive shortcuts to a foundation-first stabilization strategy:
- Dedicated Tableau expertise. We onboarded a senior Tableau developer focused specifically on uncoupling the complex data model and untangling the existing workbooks.
- Technical scaffolding. We moved beyond simple page markups to define rigorous technical requirements, including the specific filters governing data extracts and queries.
- Rigorous QA. We introduced proactive dry runs and thorough data reviews ahead of every publication deadline, surfacing architecture issues before they could reach the business.
The Outcome
The engagement moved TKG from a state of constant angst to a stable, dependable reporting environment:
- Complex reporting automated. Multi-layered reports now run reliably, covering sales by location, agent performance, year-to-date growth comparisons, and geographic zip code mapping.
- Executive visibility. High-quality dashboards give leadership real-time progress toward annual goals alongside detailed production metrics.
- Scalable architecture. By fixing the root causes of data anomalies, we created a platform capable of generating reports for numerous funeral home customers at once.
After months of constant angst over these reports, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We are much closer to having a stable environment moving forward.
Rob Adams, Director of Service Delivery, The Kilpatrick Group
Why It Worked
The previous approach treated each failure as a one-off to patch. Madison Ave treated the reporting environment as an architecture to stabilize. We put a dedicated expert on the data model rather than spreading the work thin, documented the requirements that had only ever lived in people’s heads, and built QA into the cadence so problems were caught in a dry run instead of in front of leadership. That is the difference between a report that happens to work this month and a platform the business can rely on.