Overview
Arinco partnered with Ability Roundtable, Australia’s largest benchmarking platform for disability service providers, to rebuild the data platform and benchmarking products used by more than 100 member organisations responsible for approximately $10 billion in NDIS funding. The organisation’s third-party managed platform made it difficult to understand how reports were built, delayed access to updated data and limited its ability to scale.
Arinco delivered a modern Microsoft Fabric data platform and rebuilt web portal, giving Ability Roundtable direct control over its data, reporting logic and member experience. Updated benchmarking data is now available immediately, rather than taking weeks, and members can access insights through embedded Power BI reporting. The result is a more transparent, scalable and cost-effective platform, reducing annual analytics licensing costs by around 35% while giving Ability Roundtable a foundation it owns and can continue to build on.
About Ability Roundtable
Ability Roundtable is Australia’s largest benchmarking platform for disability service providers, providing a comprehensive suite of benchmarking products across financial, allied health and home and living services. The organisation partners with more than 100 member organisations collectively responsible for approximately $10 billion in NDIS funding.
Its benchmarking insights support operational improvement, sector transparency and evidence-based decision-making across the disability sector, helping providers compare performance, identify opportunities for improvement and deliver better outcomes for people living with disability.
Business challenge
Since its inception in 2013, Ability Roundtable relied on third-party providers to run key parts of its benchmarking operations. As its membership and benchmarking products grew, the platform became increasingly costly and inflexible.
The arrangement limited Ability Roundtable’s control over its data and reporting and made it difficult to understand how metrics, calculations and reports were produced. Access to updated benchmarking data was also slow, with refreshed reports taking up to eight weeks to become available, making it harder for member organisations to check performance, identify issues and act quickly.
Ability Roundtable set out to rebuild its platform and benchmarking products from the ground up, seeking full ownership of its data and reporting, stronger governance, lower operating costs and a foundation it could continue to build on as its services expanded.
As a small, purpose-driven organisation, taking on a rebuild of this scale was a significant step. Ability Roundtable was introduced to Arinco by Microsoft’s Elevate for Nonprofits team, pairing a mission-led organisation with deep knowledge of the disability sector with a specialist Microsoft partner with the data and Azure expertise to deliver it.
Solution
Arinco delivered a modern Microsoft Fabric data platform and built new Member and Administrator web portals in Microsoft Azure, giving Ability Roundtable direct control over its benchmarking products, reporting logic and data operations.
The platform provided the foundation, but the heart of the engagement was rebuilding Ability Roundtable’s three benchmarking products – Financial & Workforce Benchmarking, Allied Health, and Home & Living. Arinco recreated each on the new platform while preserving the reports and metrics members relied on, enabling a seamless transition to a modern, scalable environment.
The solution focused on improving transparency, accelerating access to data, reducing reliance on third-party providers and establishing a platform Ability Roundtable can continue to grow and evolve.
Discovery and design
Arinco began with a focused discovery and design phase to reduce risk before commencing the broader platform rebuild. With limited documentation available for the legacy reports and underlying business rules, the team reverse-engineered the most complex benchmarking products and validated the target Microsoft Fabric architecture and web portal design before development began. This provided Ability Roundtable with confidence in the proposed approach and established a clear blueprint for delivery.
Rebuilding the data platform on Microsoft Fabric
Arinco designed and implemented a Microsoft Fabric platform using a modern Lakehouse architecture to manage benchmarking data across financial, allied health, and home and living services. Built to handle varied and complex data structures, it supports more reliable ingestion, transformation and reporting processes.
By rebuilding the platform within Ability Roundtable’s own Azure environment, Arinco helped remove its dependency on a third-party provider, enabling direct ownership of benchmarking operations, reporting logic and data governance.
Improving transparency and governance
A key focus of the engagement was giving Ability Roundtable greater visibility into how benchmarking results were produced. Existing reports could not be easily explained, with limited documentation available on how metrics and calculations were derived.
Arinco worked closely with Ability Roundtable to review, rebuild, validate and document existing reporting calculations, reconciling outputs against the legacy platform to ensure accuracy and consistency. For the first time, Ability Roundtable has complete visibility into how its benchmarking metrics are produced.
As part of this work, Arinco rebuilt and validated 57 report pages across three benchmarking products, comprising more than 100 visuals and over 700 measures. Every calculation was reconciled against the legacy platform to ensure functional parity while improving transparency and trust in the reporting process.
Arinco also introduced a central reference data store managed through Git, with version control and change tracking. This replaced previously unmanaged files and strengthened governance, auditability and consistency across benchmarking outputs.
Expanding analytics accessibility
Arinco rebuilt the web portal and introduced embedded Power BI reporting, allowing Ability Roundtable to give members access to reports without needing a separate Power BI licence for every user.
Members can now submit data directly into the platform’s Lakehouse environment, making updated benchmarking data available immediately, rather than after weeks of processing. This gives more than 100 member organisations faster access to current data, making it easier to review submissions, check data quality and use benchmarking insights in day-to-day decision-making.
The rebuilt portal also modernised how members come on board. New members can request access through a self-service sign-up, Ability Roundtable’s administrators approve and manage them directly in the portal, and access is provisioned securely through Microsoft Entra. This replaced a more manual approach and gives Ability Roundtable end-to-end control over member, organisation and access management.
Built for long-term ownership and scale
The platform was intentionally designed to be simple to manage and extend. This was important for Ability Roundtable, which wanted to reduce its reliance on external providers and build more capability within its own team.
Arinco prioritised knowledge transfer throughout delivery, helping Ability Roundtable understand how the platform works and confidently steward it over time.
With Microsoft Fabric now in place, Ability Roundtable has a platform it can continue to build on as it develops new benchmarking products and explores advanced analytics and AI.
Ongoing support through Arinco Co-Ops
To keep the platform running smoothly while Ability Roundtable builds its own internal team, Arinco also stood up an ongoing managed service through Arinco Co-Ops. Rather than handing the platform over and stepping away, Arinco continues to proactively support every layer of the solution, bringing together the specialist skill sets needed to keep it online: Azure data engineers for the Fabric platform and databases, application developers for the web portal, and Azure infrastructure and security specialists for the underlying cloud environment. The arrangement flexes as Ability Roundtable’s own capability grows.
Outcomes
The project delivered practical improvements for Ability Roundtable and its members:
- Instant data access: Reduced wait times for refreshed benchmarking data from up to eight weeks to immediate availability.
- Greater control over reporting: Gave Ability Roundtable complete visibility over benchmarking calculations, reporting logic and data transformations for the first time.
- Lower licensing costs: Reduced annual analytics licensing costs by approximately 35% through a Power BI Embedded model.
- Wider reporting reach: Removed the need for individual Power BI licences for every user, allowing Ability Roundtable to expand access to reporting as its membership grows.
- Simpler member onboarding: Introduced member self-service sign-up and a streamlined, secure onboarding workflow, giving Ability Roundtable direct control over member and organisation access.
- Improved platform management: Delivered modern member and administrator portals that simplify user administration and ongoing platform operations.
- Stronger governance: Introduced version-controlled reference data management, improving auditability, consistency and control.
- Greater independence: Enabled Ability Roundtable to manage and evolve its platform with far less reliance on third parties.
- Improved scalability: Established a platform ready to support new benchmarking products, additional members, and advanced analytics and AI.
- Better insight for members: Gave member organisations faster access to reliable data they can use to compare performance, identify issues and make informed decisions.
- Improved member and administrator experience: Introduced modern member and administrator portals that simplify onboarding, streamline platform management and make it easier for users to access and manage benchmarking information.
What's next?
With its Microsoft Fabric platform in place, Ability Roundtable has a stronger base for future reporting and benchmarking services. The organisation is continuing a phased rollout to members, while expanding reporting access, refining its existing benchmarking products and exploring future advanced analytics and AI-driven insights.
The platform has also been designed to support growth beyond the current member base, enabling Ability Roundtable to respond more quickly to changing reporting, governance, and operational needs across the NDIS sector. With Arinco continuing to support Ability Roundtable, the partnership is well positioned to keep delivering as the organisation’s needs evolve.
Arinco took due care to clearly articulate risks, trade‑offs, and consequences, adapting their communication to support informed decision‑making aligned to our understanding and business needs. Their consistent willingness to present multiple viable solutions rather than a single prescribed approach reflected a true partnership and respect for our ownership and the organisation’s strategic vision.
This approach has delivered not only a robust and scalable platform, but greater confidence in our ability to steward it over time.
