St John Ambulance partners with Simpson Associates to build the foundations for data transformation

St John Ambulance, England’s leading first aid charity, has partnered with Data Transformation Consultancy, Simpson Associates to harness the power of Microsoft Fabric and advanced analytics. This approach considers modern data architecture, secure platform infrastructure and Simpson Associates’ ETL Framework to overcome data siloes and join up data across the organisation.

This collaboration sets out to address critical business needs and deliver measurable value aligned to several use cases. These include better understanding their supporters, volunteers and customers.

Unlocking a Single Version of Truth for St John Ambulance’s Critical Mission

In order to drive impactful activities, St John Ambulance requires secure and timely access to accurate data. The charity has faced challenges with business-critical legacy systems that lack integration. The absence of centralisation often results in multiple, conflicting versions of the truth. This can hinder any charity’s ability to make key data driven decisions from data, duplicating additional work for teams, diverting focus from what matters most, ensuring people have the ability, knowledge, and skills to step forward in a medical emergency.

Through this partnership, Simpson Associates, a 2024 Microsoft Community Response Partner of the Year, has implemented a Microsoft Fabric Data Lake which will be instrumental in unlocking several use cases. This platform will help St John Ambulance to:

Improve the Data Product Workflow: Aspects such as Time to Value will be improved, enabling the St John Ambulance team to clearly and confidently manage their data to allocate resources effectively.
Save time and resources: By connecting data-siloes, this will therefore reduce the time in which the St John Ambulance team spend searching for information, and will eliminate inaccuracies.
Creating a single version of the truth: This collaboration will ensure that all departments and teams have access to the same, up-to-date information, leading to faster and more informed decisions.

Maximising Efficiency in Events Reporting and Planning

The initial focus of the project is to enhance reporting for planning, co-ordinating and tracking events. Higher data quality and ability to drill-down would operationally enable St John Ambulance to drive attendance, better organise volunteers, and optimise the supply of first aid training materials. Achieving this requires re-modelling the data in Fabric, staged in bronze-silver-gold layers before feeding into Power BI. Joining and transforming the data in Fabric, as opposed to PBI dataflows, will optimise computational performance, reduce bottlenecks, and provide an organised structure for clarity in centralised logic.

Ultimately, this empowers the right people having access to the right information, at the right time.

“Data is crucial and plays a vital role in our work at St John Ambulance. A solid and effective Data Lake will help us save time and much more, ultimately meeting the needs of volunteers, employees and supporters. We needed a platform which could handle large volumes of data, eliminate inaccuracies, and enable a single version of the truth. That’s why we partnered with Simpson Associates, their technical expertise and demonstrated experience with charities therefore made them the chosen partner for this project.

Since starting to build out the secure Data Lake, we can now start to collate and leverage data-driven insights and data from across St John Ambulance, and allow us to gain a complete picture of what is happening at specific points in time, making it easier for our teams to measure the impact of our work. Additionally, this saves time and resources, meaning that we can make smarter, data-driven decisions and respond faster in our mission to teach first aid and support the national emergency response system.”

Quote from Steve Lowell, Head of Data & Analytics at St John Ambulance

Laying the Foundation for the Future

This foundational project is the first step in a long-term data roadmap and transformation at St John Ambulance, supporting future enhancements and developments. Through utilising the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, they can optimise efficiency, uphold data quality, and provide their organisation with analytics that drive the right outcomes.

Jake O’Meara, Business Development Manager at Simpson Associates, comments:

“I am extremely pleased to announce this collaboration with St John Ambulance, actively demonstrating the power of data for good and using data to drive actionable insights.

By leveraging leading technologies and expertise, St John Ambulance will be able to harness large quantities of data more effectively and efficiently, supporting their mission. This new Microsoft based data platform, underpinned by data lake architecture, has the potential to transform St John Ambulance with actionable and timely insights so that they can empower every community with the confidence and ability to act when first aid is required.”

About St John Ambulance

St John Ambulance wants to put the power of first aid into everybody’s hands. Our vision is a world where everyone in a health crisis receives the help they need from those around them.

We are the charity that steps forward in the moments that matter. To save lives, keep communities safe and empower people with life-saving skills.

We are a market leader in the provision of workplace first aid training, supplies and event and ambulance services. Money from our commercial operations is used to fund our charitable purpose to keep people safe and protected.

Visit sja.org.uk.

About Simpson Associates

With over 30 years of experience and a strong track record of enabling purpose-led and nonprofit organisations, Simpson Associates is a leading data transformation consultancy helping not-for-profits and charities unlock insight from their data. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner and the 2024 Microsoft Community Response Partner of the Year, Simpson Associates delivers trusted expertise across leading technologies, including Microsoft Fabric.

Simpson Associates mission extends beyond technology – they are dedicated to helping purpose-led organisations harness data as a lever for change, empowering them to realise business value and truly implement using ‘data for good.’