Brimscombe Energy / BG-Demo – Onboarding
Callcompleted
Brimscombe Energy · 10 Mar 2025 11:45
Onboarding call on 10 Mar 2025. The first group already got a useful answer with one site missing, traced to an unconnected legacy extract. Refresh timing, a second admin and value measures were agreed.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Onboarding call on 10 Mar 2025. The first group already got a useful answer with one site missing, traced to an unconnected legacy extract. Refresh timing, a second admin and value measures were agreed.
What happened: Siân Pritchard reported that the key-account lead got a useful answer from the early pages, with one site missing. Nikhil Rao traced it to a legacy billing extract outside the three granted schemas.
Customer view: Siân will not claim savings until a fortnight of before-measures exists. She wants the view to be current, so the refresh will key off a completion flag in a control table with an alert at half past five.
Watch: Nikhil is the only admin, and Siân asked for a second. The legacy extract may hold personal data, the metering schema may change without warning, and the control table grant is not yet in.
Commercial: Callie confirmed £115k a year on the order form for Enterprise with one hundred and eighty users, matching the invoice. Tom Ashdown owns commercial terms and Daniel Okafor becomes the customer success manager at handover.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Theme
Access, refresh and first value
Importance
neutral
Sentiment
positive
Voice
champion
Who was there
BG-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Nikhil Rao answers on personal data in the legacy extract by Wednesday and grants read on the control table.
- Siân Pritchard sends the first group's names and the three value measures by Thursday.
- Callie Brennan sends the access checklist, endpoint list, setup notes and runbook by tomorrow afternoon, ahead of the first refresh.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Nikhil is the only admin, so absence would stall changes until a second admin is named.
- The legacy extract may contain personal data and the metering schema may change without warning.
- Value is unproven until the fortnight of before-measures is taken and compared.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- The legacy extract can be added to wave one, and the numbers show room within the connector limit.
- The first group's early answer gives Siân a concrete example to build the value case on.
- Wider user waves by role could follow once the team leads confirm the answers are right.
Transcript
Callie BrennanHello, can you hear me all right? I've got Nikhil on the screen already.
Nikhil RaoYep. Loud and clear.- Callie BrennanLovely. Siân's in the lobby, I'll let her in. There we go.
Siân PritchardSorry, sorry. Back to back since nine. Morning, both. Can you hear me? My headset's been playing up.- Callie BrennanPerfectly. Morning, Siân. No rush, we've only just started. How was the weekend, did you get out at all?
- Siân PritchardA walk up the hill, in the rain, so yes. Very Welsh of me. Nikhil, you were on call, weren't you?
- Nikhil RaoNot officially. I looked at the load history on Sunday night anyway. Habit.
- Callie BrennanWhich is a good place to start, actually. So, plan for the next forty minutes. First, where we are on access and connectors, what's live and what isn't. Second, the first refresh: when we switch it on and who watches it. Third, owners, so every source has a name against it. And last, next steps, with a date against each. Does that work for you both?
- Siân PritchardThat works. Can I say one thing first? It's what the teams asked the brain this week, because it sets the context.
- Callie BrennanPlease do.
- Siân PritchardSo we're not live for everyone, obviously, it's the small group using the early pages. But the key-account lead asked, in plain words, which of her business customers have a contract coming up for renewal and have also rung us twice about a bill. And she got an answer, with the sites listed. Before, that was a half day of spreadsheets and a favour from someone in billing.
- Callie BrennanThat's exactly the sort of question it's built for. Was the answer right?
- Siân PritchardMostly. One site was missing, and that's the bit I want to come back to, because I think it's a source we haven't connected yet. Let's measure it before we claim it, though. I'm not putting that in a slide until we've checked the missing one.
- Callie BrennanGood. I'll note it and we'll find it in the connector list. Nikhil, over to you. What's the state of access?
- Nikhil RaoDone on my side for the first wave. I created a dedicated role in our Snowflake account last week, read access on the three source schemas, write only on the schema the brain owns. Nothing else. I checked the load history after the test load and it finished clean, well inside the window.
- Callie BrennanThat maps cleanly to what I need. Before we switch on the refresh, I'd like the role name and the grants in writing, in the access checklist, not just agreed on a call. Is that all right?
- Nikhil RaoI'd insist on it. Which role has access should be on paper. I won't send credentials by email either. They go through the secrets store and I'll tell you when they're there.
- Callie BrennanPerfect, that's how I'd want it. I never start a connector without written access, so we're aligned.
- Siân PritchardWhich is why I'm happy for Nikhil to hold the keys. Our auditors will ask, and he'll be the one answering.
- Nikhil RaoWhich brings me to documentation. Whatever we set up, I want a note an auditor can follow without ringing me. Source, owner, what it reads, how often, who approved it.
- Callie BrennanThat's the setup note, and you'll get one per connector, plus an overall one at handover. I don't hand over without it. We're on Enterprise, so security review support is part of the implementation, and this is the material it draws on.
- Nikhil RaoGood. Then I'll hold the review questions until I've seen the note rather than answer from memory.
- Callie BrennanSensible. Right, connectors. Let me share my screen. Give me a second... can you see the tracker?
- Siân PritchardI can. It's small but I can read it.
- Callie BrennanI'll zoom. So, Enterprise gives you twenty connectors. Nikhil, you told me at kickoff there are twenty-odd sources around the Snowflake account, so we have to choose rather than connect everything. The way I've grouped it is three waves. Wave one is the ones that answer your three teams' questions: the CRM, the billing and accounts data, the helpdesk, the call recorder and the mailboxes. Wave two is the contract and metering data. Wave three is everything else.
- Nikhil RaoMetering is a schema change waiting to happen. Just so you know. The team that owns it renames columns without telling anyone.
- Callie BrennanNoted, and that's exactly why it's wave two, not one. I'd rather get your first refresh landing cleanly on sources that behave. What I need from your side is a named person on the metering side who'll tell us before a change goes in.
- Nikhil RaoI'll find out who that is. It might be me, which is the problem.
- Siân PritchardIt might well be you. Let's not pretend otherwise. Put me down as the business owner for metering, then, and Nikhil as the technical one. At least there are two names.
- Callie BrennanDone. Business owner Siân, technical owner Nikhil. I'll put that in the tracker now.
- Callie BrennanNow, Siân, the missing site from your key-account question. Do you know which system it would sit in?
- Siân PritchardI think it's a customer who came over when we took on a book of business from another supplier. Their records live in an older billing extract, not the main system. Nikhil?
- Nikhil RaoRight, the legacy extract. It lands in a separate schema once a day. It isn't in the three I granted. That's the gap.
- Siân PritchardSo it's not the brain that's wrong. It simply hasn't been told about it.
- Callie BrennanExactly. And that's the sort of thing I'd rather find in week one of the refresh than in month three. Can we put the legacy extract into wave one? It's one more connector, and the numbers say we've room.
- Nikhil RaoI'd want to grant it separately. Read only, separate role if I can. I'll check what's in that schema first, there may be personal data in there that shouldn't be.
- Callie BrennanThat's the right instinct. Tell me what you find and we'll decide whether to mask anything before it's indexed.
- Nikhil RaoWill do. I'll have an answer by Wednesday.
- Callie BrennanThanks. Writing that down. Now the refresh itself. The nightly refresh is meant to be complete by 07:00 on business days. That's for every tier, but with Enterprise you're credited on freshness as well as availability, so it's worth us setting it up carefully. Nikhil, what are your constraints on the schedule?
- Nikhil RaoOur own loads finish in the early hours, and they're not always on time. If your refresh starts before they finish, it reads half a day. So I'd want it keyed off a completion flag, not a clock.
- Callie BrennanYes, that's far better. Can you give us a table or a flag we can read to say the loads are done?
- Nikhil RaoThere's a control table. It has a status and a timestamp per load. I'll grant read on that alone.
- Callie BrennanLovely, that makes it much more robust. So we start the refresh when the control table says done, and we alert you if it isn't done by a cut-off. What cut-off would you like?
- Nikhil RaoHalf past five. If it's not done by then something's broken and I want to know before the teams do.
- Siân PritchardAnd I'd like to know too, but only if it affects the morning. Complaints can't work from yesterday's facts. If a customer's rung in overnight and the record's stale, that's a deadline I might miss, and I don't miss those.
- Callie BrennanUnderstood. We'll route the alert to Nikhil first and copy you only if the cut-off is missed. I'll write that into the runbook so it isn't just in our heads.
- Siân PritchardThank you. One customer, one view, but only if the view is current.
- Callie BrennanThat's a good way to put it. Right, when do we switch it on? Nikhil, you've told me before you don't change production on a Friday.
- Nikhil RaoNever. And not the day before a billing run either. Tuesday or Wednesday, mid-week, so there's a day either side if something goes wrong.
- Callie BrennanThen I'd propose the first refresh on Wednesday of next week, once the legacy extract question is answered and the control table grant is in. If anything slips, we move it a week rather than rush.
- Siân PritchardI'm fine with that. I'd rather it was right than early. The leadership team are expecting something at the end of the month, and a clean refresh is a better story than a fast one.
- Nikhil RaoWednesday works. I'll confirm in writing once the grants are in.
- Callie BrennanThank you. Let me pause on the schedule and look at users, because that's the other part of the plan. You've licensed one hundred and eighty seats. Siân, how do you want to bring people in?
- Siân PritchardIn waves, and not by department, by role. First the team leads in key accounts, collections and complaints, because they know what good looks like and they'll tell us honestly when the answer's wrong. Then their teams. Then the rest, much later, if the numbers justify it. I don't want a hundred and eighty people logging in on day one and deciding it's not for them.
- Callie BrennanThat's exactly what I'd recommend. A small group that's confident carries the rest. Do you have an idea of how many in the first group?
- Siân PritchardA couple of dozen at most. I'll send you the names. I want each one to have a real question they'll ask in the first week, so nobody's just poking around.
- Callie BrennanBrilliant. Real questions are the best training there is. I'll build the first session around them, with your teams' own examples.
- Nikhil RaoOn access: SSO. Is that in scope for this phase?
- Callie BrennanIt is, Enterprise includes SSO and SCIM. What I need from your side is the identity provider details and someone who can approve the SCIM group mapping. Is that you?
- Nikhil RaoThe mapping, yes. The provider's run by a colleague in IT. I'll bring them in. They'll want to know what attributes you read.
- Callie BrennanJust name, email and group membership. Nothing else. I'll write that down so they have it in front of them rather than taking my word for it.
- Nikhil RaoGood. Send it before the meeting, not after.
- Callie BrennanWill do. So that's a call with your colleague in IT, I'll suggest the end of this week. Siân, anything you want to add on users before I move on?
- Siân PritchardOnly that Nikhil is the admin and I'm the champion, but there should be a second admin. If Nikhil's on leave and something needs doing I don't want to be waiting.
- Nikhil RaoFair. I'll nominate someone from my team. Not this week, I'd like to see the first refresh behave first.
- Callie BrennanThat's a good sequence. I'd also want that person on the handover session so they've seen it run, not just read about it. Leaving your admins able to run things alone is the whole point of this phase.
- Siân PritchardWhich I appreciate. We've had suppliers who go quiet the day after go-live.
- Callie BrennanNot on my watch. And once we've handed over, Daniel Okafor picks it up as your customer success manager, so you'll have a name for the quarterly conversations. Tom Ashdown's still your contact for anything commercial.
- Siân PritchardGood, I know Tom. And I've met Daniel once, briefly. That's fine.
- Callie BrennanRight. Let me stop sharing and come to value, because Siân mentioned measuring things. What do you want to measure, and from when?
- Siân PritchardThree things. How long it takes the key-account team to answer a renewal question. How often collections have to chase another team for a bill or a call note before they can ring a customer. And complaint handling, specifically how much of the time to answer is spent just finding the facts.
- Callie BrennanAnd do you have a baseline for those today?
- Siân PritchardNot a clean one. I've got estimates from the team leads, which I don't trust. So the first job is to measure the before, properly, for a fortnight, and only then compare. I'm not going to say it saved us anything until I can show it.
- Callie BrennanThat's the right discipline, and it'll make the first business review much easier. The brain records the questions asked and who asked them, so we can pair that with your before numbers. I'd suggest we agree the three measures in writing this week.
- Siân PritchardI'll draft them tonight and send them across. Nikhil, can you tell me what the brain can and can't tell us about usage, so I don't promise anything we can't see?
- Nikhil RaoI'll test it first. I'm not going to tell you what it records until I've looked at what it actually writes to the schema.
- Siân PritchardWhich is why I like working with you.
- Callie BrennanHa. And I'd say the same, it saves me being wrong. Right, a quick question on the ticket you raised last month. I can see one open item against the account. Is that still live?
- Nikhil RaoThat's the how-to on service accounts. It's answered, I just haven't closed it. I'll close it this afternoon.
- Callie BrennanLovely, nothing urgent on it from our side. Nothing on the priority list either, which is how I like it at this stage.
- Siân PritchardOne more thing before we run out of time. The commercial side, so Graham doesn't get surprised. We're contracted at one hundred and fifteen thousand a year, that's the figure I've got in my head and I want to check it's the same in yours.
- Callie BrennanYes, £115,000 a year on the order form, Enterprise, one hundred and eighty users. That's the same figure as the invoice, so you're consistent with finance. I'd leave anything beyond that to Tom, he owns the commercial terms.
- Siân PritchardThat's all I wanted. I don't go around Graham on money, and I'd like him to hear the same number from both of us.
- Callie BrennanUnderstood. Now, let me use the last stretch for risks. If I've got this right, there are three. The legacy extract might contain data that needs masking. The metering schema may change without warning. And the control table grant isn't in yet. Is there anything I've missed?
- Nikhil RaoThe network allow list. The brain's reading from outside our account for the helpdesk and the call recorder, and those endpoints need to be on the list. Not a big thing, but it's the sort of thing that fails quietly.
- Callie BrennanGood catch. I'll send the list of endpoints with the access checklist and you can tell me if anything's missing. I'd rather it fails on a call than at six in the morning.
- Nikhil RaoAgreed.
- Siân PritchardCan I make one request? When we get to the first week of the refresh, can we have a short check-in each morning, ten minutes, just to say it landed. I'd rather over-communicate than find out from the complaints team.
- Callie BrennanAbsolutely. A short note each morning from me in the first week, plus a ten-minute call on the first day. If it's quiet we'll drop it.
- Siân PritchardPerfect.
- Callie BrennanRight, let me read back who's doing what, and stop me if I get any of it wrong. Nikhil: confirms the role and grants in writing, checks the legacy extract for personal data and gives me an answer by Wednesday, grants read on the control table, supplies the network allow list, and brings in your colleague in IT for the identity provider. Yes?
- Nikhil RaoYes. I'd add that I send the secrets store notification when credentials are in, not before.
- Callie BrennanAdded. Siân: names for the first group of users, with a real question each, the three value measures drafted, and a business owner against each source. Is that right?
- Siân PritchardThat's right. I'll have the names and the measures to you by Thursday. Owners by the end of the week.
- Callie BrennanThank you. And me: the access checklist with the role name and grants, the endpoint list, a setup note per connector for wave one, the SCIM attribute note before the IT call, and the runbook with the alert routing. I'll get those to you by tomorrow afternoon. First refresh on Wednesday of next week if all of it is in.
- Nikhil RaoFine. If the checklist is late I'm moving the date, not the checklist.
- Callie BrennanThat's how it should be. Anything else from either of you?
- Siân PritchardNo, I'm happy. That was useful. It's a lot clearer in my head than it was an hour ago.
- Nikhil RaoNothing from me.
- Callie BrennanThen thank you both. Speak soon, and I'll put the notes in the shared folder as well so they're there for the next call.
- Siân PritchardDiolch, Callie. Diolch, Nikhil. Speak soon.
- Nikhil RaoCheers.
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