About Hopton - frequently asked questions

Yes, we welcome visitors to our Leeds base for in-person workshops, discovery sessions, and project reviews. The London presence is more flexible and we typically meet London clients at their offices or at central London locations rather than at a fixed Hopton London office. Email hello@hoptonanalytics.com to arrange a visit.

Hopton publishes case studies selectively. We publish anonymised composites in our whitepapers and FAQs based on real engagements, with details obscured to protect client confidentiality. Named case studies are available where clients have explicitly agreed to public reference. Most of our client work is not published because the analytical advantage being created is the kind of thing clients prefer not to advertise.

Yes — Hopton publishes its frameworks publicly, and deliberately. Our governance framework, our trust framework for AI outputs (the Model Trust One-Pager and the Trust Storytelling Delivery Checklist), the Business Value Question, the Project Gate, the Analytics Maturity Model, and the FP&A Power BI playbook are all published in our whitepapers and FAQs. We share working templates with clients on request. Publishing the frameworks costs us nothing and helps the broader Microsoft data community.

Yes — Hopton serves clients outside the UK, but selectively. Our primary market is UK and Ireland mid-market businesses. We have worked with clients with international operations - multi-currency consolidation, cross-border data, international subsidiaries reporting up to a UK head office - and we have done specific projects for clients headquartered outside the UK. We are not a global consultancy and we are honest about that.

Hopton holds Microsoft Partner accreditation, with active work towards the Solutions Partner for Data and AI designation. Level 3 Pyramid Analytics accreditation. The team holds individual Microsoft certifications across the data and analytics stack. Accreditations are useful as one signal of capability but the work delivered for clients is the more important reference.

Hopton Analytics is a Microsoft data and analytics consultancy. We deliver Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central reporting and analytics work for mid-market businesses across the UK and Ireland. Our work covers the full data and analytics stack, from extracting data out of operational systems through to executive dashboards, machine learning, and AI-augmented analytics. We are a delivery firm: we build the analytics estates we recommend rather than producing strategy documents and walking away.

Hopton Lens is our internal product offering: a multi-tenant, white-labelled AI Q&A tool built on top of Power BI semantic models using the Anthropic API. It allows business users to ask natural language questions of their certified semantic models and receive narrative answers with supporting data and sources. Lens is in active development and is offered to clients alongside Power BI and Fabric implementations. It is not a public product available for self-service; it is part of our consulting offer.

The Hopton Insight Series is our published library of whitepapers covering the topics mid-market data and analytics leaders care most about. Topics include Power BI at scale, the true cost of Power BI and Fabric, data governance, self-service BI, AI and Copilot, the analytics maturity model, and modernising analytics on legacy ERP systems. Each whitepaper includes the frameworks we use in client engagements. The series is available on our website. The frameworks are deliberately published rather than kept proprietary because most of the value is in the work of applying them, not the documents themselves.

We do not implement ERP systems (we work with the BC partner, not as the BC partner). We do not deliver Salesforce-specific work as a primary engagement. We do not work on non-Microsoft analytics stacks (Tableau, Qlik, Looker, Sisense) other than to migrate clients off them onto Power BI. We do not do generic IT consulting, software development, or cybersecurity work. Our scope is the Microsoft data and analytics stack, end to end.

Across 62 client organisations, Hopton has cut reporting time by an average of 70%, recovered an average of £127,000 in cost per engagement, and the governed reporting environments we build run at an average 94% data accuracy rate. These are averages across Analytics Acceleration Programme engagements, not projections for a single project, and the figures vary by starting point and scope. We can share anonymised reference architectures and outcome data relevant to your sector on request.

Hopton serves mid-market businesses across retail, wholesale and distribution, consumer goods (FMCG), construction, recruitment, professional services (law, accountancy, consultancy), commercial healthcare, and manufacturing. The Microsoft data and analytics architectural patterns transfer across these sectors; the dashboard libraries and the data sources differ. The pattern is sector knowledge built from real delivery rather than generic capability claimed without it.

Mid-market is our primary focus: typically £10 million to £500 million turnover, between 50 and 2,000 staff. Smaller businesses occasionally engage us for specific projects, and we have worked with larger businesses for specific data and analytics workstreams. The mid-market focus reflects where the Analytics Acceleration Programme works best and where our team's experience is concentrated.

Hopton specialises in the Microsoft data and analytics stack. Power BI for visualisation, semantic modelling, and self-service. Microsoft Fabric for the unified data platform (lakehouse, warehouse, data engineering, real-time intelligence, data science). Azure Data Factory and the broader Azure data services. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for the ERP integration work that often sits underneath analytics engagements. Microsoft 365 Copilot and Power BI Copilot for AI-augmented analytics. We do not work outside the Microsoft stack as a primary technology choice.

Leeds is our home and where the team is concentrated. We have a presence in London for client work and in-person engagements. Most of our work is delivered remotely with periodic in-person time on site, which suits the mid-market client base across the UK and Ireland. Geographic location of the client is rarely a constraint; we work with clients from Edinburgh to Cornwall and across Ireland.

The leadership team includes Simon Devine (Managing Director), Shauna Duffy (Director of Delivery and People, responsible for client delivery and team), Claire Harper (Head of Projects), Bryn Jones (commercial lead), and senior practice leads across data architecture, project management, and reporting. The structure is deliberately flat for a firm of our size. Clients work directly with the people who do the work; we do not run a model where a senior consultant pitches and a junior team delivers.

Leeds has a strong technology and financial services community, a mature Microsoft partner ecosystem, and excellent transport links to London, Manchester, and the rest of the UK. The team is largely Leeds-based and we have built our internal culture and operating rhythm around the city. The cost base is materially lower than London, which we pass through to clients as more competitive day rates without compromising on the calibre of the team.

We built our practice on Microsoft technologies because for most UK organisations, Microsoft is the right foundation - governed, scalable, and deeply integrated with the tools your teams already use. That focus has not changed. What has changed is that we have added Pyramid Analytics to our practice, because the best answer for AI-powered decision intelligence is not always a single-vendor stack. We are now Pyramid Analytics Partner of the Year alongside our Microsoft practice - which means we can recommend the right platform for your specific situation, rather than the one that fits our preferred toolset.