Migration Success Story #1
Client Overview
- Industry: Retail Omnichannel
- Company Size: 500M€ revenue, 4 thousand employees
- Previous BI Tool: MicroStrategy
- New BI Tool: Power BI
Challenges Faced
- Lack of new talents to develop the BI platform.
- Solution built 15 years ago, not fitting the current business needs.
- Lack of user adoption and self-service analytics.
- Difficulty integrating with modern cloud infrastructure.
Migration Process
Step 1: Planning and Assessment
- Conducted workshops with stakeholders.
- Analysed the data environment and usage statistics.
- Identified key reports for migration.
- Defined a clear migration roadmap.
Step 2: Infrastructure Preparation
- Decision to migrate data layer to Azure Databrics.
- Listed all the needed sources tables.
- Implemented ETL framework.
- Implemented Power BI Deployment Framework
Step 3: Data Migration and Report Conversion
- Indicateed 1 stream to start the migration process
- Proposed the initial star schema model in GOLD layer
- Confirmed the Business Logic with the Business Owners of the Data/Reports
- Divided the reports to be migrated into the batches
- Built new Power BI reports in order, using the criteria of the business value (high) and technical complexity (low)
- Introduced the new way of working: close collaboration between BI Product Owner, Business Owner and the team of Power BI Developers and Data Engineers
- Iterated the process through other streams
Step 4: User Adoption and Training
- Conducted Power BI training workshops.
- Implemented governance tools for secure access.
- Provided ongoing support and user feedback sessions.
- Implemented Power BI Monitoring Accelerator
Results and Impact
- Higher users’ engagement: Company received modern BI Tool, easy to use and to get the information about it.
- Better access to the Talent Pool: Center of Excellence was created
- Faster and Agile development process: Switching from Waterfall to more Agile approach with Reports development.
- Improved Decision-Making: Enabled self-service analytics and real-time reporting.
Lessons Learned & Best Practices
- Ensure stakeholder alignment early in the process.
- Start with a pilot migration before full-scale deployment.
- Leverage Power BI’s governance features to maintain data integrity.
- Provide continuous training and adoption tracking.