Do It Yourself

StudyPoint, an at-home tutoring company for grade school students, helps kids excel in their coursework and on standardized tests such as the SATs. But giving help does not preclude a company from needing some itself. Thanks to steady growth and unwieldy data gathering methods, StudyPoint needed the kind of assistance only a dashboard can provide.

Launched in 1999, StudyPoint has 10 offices, thousands of clients, and about $4.2 million in annual sales. It works with more than 800 independent tutors but has just 20 full-time employees. For years, metrics such as test scores were tracked by each local office using individual Microsoft Access databases. Results were sent to the Stoneham (Mass.) headquarters, compiled, copied, and pasted into Excel. That worked well enough when the company was just starting out, but over time, it became "very manually intensive, very inefficient," says StudyPoint CEO Rich Enos. It took a week to process even the most basic reports. Enos knew the company needed a single tool to bring all the data together more quickly.