Meet the Team - Fred Whipp

Our dashboard extraordinaire and Head of Presales for North America Fred Whipp talks to us about getting value from your data and why Goodfellas is his favourite film, even if the Mafia rarely demonstrates good data analysis skills...

Hi Fred, could you tell us what your current job role is? 

Hello! I’m VP of Business Development for North America at mpro5 inc. 

And how long have you been with mpro5? 

I’ve been with the company for three years now. I started as a junior data analyst before moving up to department head, and then I crossed the Atlantic to help our American business. 

Just for fun, can you tell us what your favourite film is?

I’d have to pick Goodfellas. The way that the music reflects the change in time periods over the film is cool, and I think there’s a small part of everyone who wants to be a wise guy! 

So, what does that involve daily? 

I now run demos for potential customers, to show them all the exciting capabilities our platform has, complete with dashboards, Internet of Things sensors and workflows for the mobile app. 

Could you tell us a little about your background? 

Before working at mpro5, I was an internal auditor for recruiters PageGroup. It was here that I discovered my passion for data analytics and Power BI. 

I really knew what I wanted to do from then, so when the opportunity came to work at mpro5 I jumped at the chance. 

What value can dashboards bring to a business? 

I was reading an article the other day that announced the death of the dashboard, which I couldn’t disagree with more! 

The problem is that many companies end up with generic, out-of-the-box dashboards that tell them nothing but the most basic information – this is when dashboards die.  

The real art of data analytics is digging into the data to find and surface the problems. We take a very custom approach to dashboards by working with our customers on what KPIs are critical to them individually. 

What a good dashboard should do is tell you where there is room for action, what places in your operations that you can make an active difference in. Critically, they should be designed so that anyone can understand them and investigate, not just other analysts. 

Finally, what’s the most exciting part of your job? 

Customers often come to us asking for a dashboard they already have, but in Power BI. This is OK, but it’s not really getting to the central question, which should be: what value can we get out of a dashboard? 

Once we create a dashboard that delivers actionable change, that shows a customer metrics they didn’t think they could measure, and creates insights that transform their approach, that is when I get excited. 

You know you’ve really helped when they come back to you to ask for a completely new metric to be measured, it shows you’ve helped them to think creatively about their data.