Introduction
MTM Consulting stands at the forefront of education market research, empowering education leaders in schools and universities with the critical insights they need to shape their institutions’ futures. Having partnered with over 600 schools across the UK, MTM Consulting relies heavily on data analytics as the foundation of its services.
Danny Neilson and Alison Hewitt, who head the Data Analytics team, have been pivotal in developing and refining MTM Consulting’s data infrastructure. Their ongoing efforts to enhance this setup have been essential in meeting the company’s growing demands.
Challenge
However, as MTM Consulting expanded its commercial footprint, its data infrastructure began to experience scalability issues, which ultimately threatened MTM’s ability to explore new segments and markets.
Danny and Alison were bogged down by the need to manually run processes, which slowed operations and diverted attention from more strategic tasks. In short, the existing infrastructure couldn’t keep up. This limitation directly impacted the company’s ability to grow, as the infrastructure was struggling to support the existing client base and facilitate expansion into new markets. MTM was missing out on valuable opportunities to broaden its reach.
"Our previous infrastructure claimed to support the scale we needed, but it quickly became clear that would not cope with our demands. As a result, we found ourselves manually running over 40 workflows each morning before starting our day jobs, taking around 3 hours."
Danny Neilson, Senior Data Analyst
The rising costs of maintaining the current system compounded these challenges. Already investing in the five figures annually, the prospect of upgrading their infrastructure—pushing costs into six digits—was simply not sustainable. The combination of these factors made it clear that the existing setup was no longer viable for MTM Consulting’s future ambitions.
Solution
Danny and Alison began migrating to Less in June, 2024. By the beginning of September, their Less platform was already serving over 35 clients. In the process, the team at MTM Consulting has developed a range of impactful solutions covering admissions insights, school market size, population projections, and catchment areas using Less. One of the standout solutions utilises the new GeoSpatial tool suite in Less.
"Our migration from Alteryx to Less has been such a smooth experience. Onboarding new clients now takes minutes, not hours. This improvement alone has freed our time to automate other daily tasks, revolutionising the delivery of some of our other solutions."
Danny Neilson, Senior Data Analyst
This solution empowers schools and universities to gain deeper insights into their student demographics by analysing key factors such as average driving distances to campus, public transportation access, and the distribution of students within 10-minute driving intervals. All within Less and without any coding requirements.
"The Less team have also been easy to work with; it feels like they're listening to ideas as opposed to adding to a list for consideration."
Danny Neilson, Senior Data Analyst
The solution integrates and extracts data from MSSQL databases, consolidating more than ten tables for each school in a unified model. It creates coordinates from addresses, calculates drive times, and creates areas (polygons) around the schools. All of which is stored in Less for client distribution in Tableau.
Results
The migration to Less resulted in a 60% reduction in software costs, making the migration not only cost-effective but also net profitable within the first year.
With the new infrastructure, MTM Consulting achieved a tenfold increase in its capacity to onboard new clients, thanks to the significant boost in scalability.
Our migration to Less has been a game-changer for our analytics. The two major gains are in managing our data warehouse and the scheduling capability, which massively reduce our costs. Rebuilding everything in a new tool is always challenging, but our team seems very positive about our progress, something I've not heard from them in a while. "
James Leggett, Managing Director
The team now manages nearly 15,000 fully automated jobs each month, seamlessly handling data extraction, manipulation, and storage. The Less platform synchronises over 320 million rows of data every month, providing the foundation for MTM’s continued expansion.
With their new data infrastructure, MTM is well-positioned to explore new markets and segments, fuelling their growth journey.
