The Quality Education and Skills Training (QUEST) Alliance is a not-for-profit organisation focused on research-led innovation and advocacy in teaching and learning, helping young learners and facilitators build real-world, 21st-century skills through modern technology. Engaging multiple stakeholders to enable scalable solutions in education and vocational training using Information and Communication Technology (ICT), QUEST wanted a well-structured analytics system capable of handling large volumes of data built, by preference, on open-source tools that a lean non-profit could sustainably afford. They also needed a future-proof, multi-organisation architecture that could accommodate changes to existing applications, absorb new ones, and mirror their wider organisational structure as they scaled their reach.
QUEST had already attempted reporting and dashboards across several commercial tools including Zoho Reports, Tableau, and Power BI - but none delivered the expected results. Without an integrated workflow or data pipeline behind them, the tools left data fragmented, and the team needed the underlying foundation fixed before any reporting layer could succeed.
Reporting had been tried across multiple tools, but with no integrated workflow or data pipeline the data remained fragmented and siloed - a significant obstacle for the team.
The existing Power BI implementation was rudimentary, consuming database views directly, which resulted in consistently poor performance.
Dashboards were not designed properly and the system as a whole was never built to handle scale; a non-modular approach further slowed performance.
Loading the large, unstructured data logs streaming from mobile devices was a major technical challenge the existing setup could not handle.
Focaloid designed and implemented an integrated, open-source data pipeline and BI layer replacing direct database queries with a warehouse-backed, modular architecture built to scale with the organisation.
Introduced a data warehouse and an ETL tool to aggregate data from QUEST’s various sources and applications into a single, integrated pipeline.
Researched and introduced open-source tools without compromising performance or usability, aligning with the non-profit’s preference for a cost-effective, sustainable solution.
Proposed a layered architecture that is scalable, more efficient, and easily maintainable replacing the non-modular, direct-query setup that had been throttling performance.
Mapped data to different use cases and defined ETL flows that support multiple organisations, in line with QUEST’s multi-company structure.
Focaloid began with stakeholder discovery and a review of the existing system, then built and rolled out the solution in four structured phases.
Held discussions with business stakeholders to understand their needs and translate them into concrete data requirements.
Reviewed the existing implementation to surface bottlenecks, then evaluated open-source BI tools — running proof-of-concept builds on Metabase and Apache Superset, and selecting Superset for its fit and the data team’s familiarity with it.
Implemented the solution using Talend as the ETL layer, MySQL as the data warehouse, and Superset as the BI layer — integrating multiple data sources and embedding custom business logic into the ETL layer.
Built reports and dashboards in Apache Superset and validated the full pipeline end to end through testing and QA.
For a non-profit working to equip young learners with real-world skills, data is how impact gets measured - but only if the team can actually see it. Scattered tools and siloed data meant QUEST’s reporting told a fragmented story, slowly. By rebuilding the foundation - a warehouse-backed, open-source pipeline feeding well-designed Superset dashboards - Focaloid turned fragmented data into reliable, scalable intelligence the organisation can sustain on a non-profit budget. That’s data infrastructure working in service of the mission, not competing with it for funds.
We design integrated, open-source data pipelines and BI platforms - warehouse-backed, modular, and built to grow with your organisation, so your reporting becomes a reliable foundation rather than a bottleneck.