How Eurial's IT department helps its business business users to reclaim their data data
A look back at the experience of a committed company and France's 2nd largest dairy cooperative in 2024, with 3,860 member milk producers, 2.4 billion liters of milk collected, 23 sites in France, including 7 certified organic...
Issues
At Eurial, the dairy branch of the Agrial Group, the deployment of Power BI represented an important step. The company wanted to align the use of Power BI across the group, while ensuring that the tool met its specific business needs. At the same time, they wanted to ensure that the tool met their specific business needs, and that best practices were disseminated to promote uniformity across the group.
At the same time, governance was essential to guarantee the security, relevance and quality of the data used in Power BI. Eurial also had to adapt the configuration of Power BI, taking into account its various activities and particularities. Managing and controlling access to both the tool and the data represented another major challenge, to ensure the confidentiality and security of the information.
Eurial wanted to make relevant data easily accessible to users, thus promoting analysis and decision-making. The company therefore wanted to promote user autonomy by providing a "self-BI" environment where users could explore and analyze data on their own.
Method
Performing an audit
- Close certain default settings (+ 100 existing ones) and be vigilant when Microsoft releases new administration settings;
- Definition of access policy and rights granted (by role, population, etc.) ;
- Restrict access to workspaces and set up an organization by
branch; - Securing data access ;
- Disseminating and monitoring best practices.
Data security
For historical and performance reasons, it was not desirable to provide direct access to operational data. Power BI was therefore deployed in disconnected mode, with Excel sources only, hosted on a dedicated Sharepoint.
Setting up Power BI
When a company implements Power BI, there are 3 possible scenarios:
- Make users 100% autonomous while the IT department is a spectator;
- Allowing users to retain a high degree of autonomy with an IT department that plays the
role of facilitator and supports users in their needs; - A CIO who governs, rules and creates the reports made available to users.
Eurial chose the second solution for its hybrid mode, favoring user autonomy in the creation of reports, but in some cases with the most complex reports produced by the IT teams.
Employee support
Concrete workshops have been set up:
- First phase with three pilot businesses, then gradually opened up to all businesses. This enabled the businesses to be autonomous in the creation of their reports and data models (Dataset);
- Second phase of support for future users, again in the form of workshops adapted to their level, whether they are complete beginners in implementing a BI project or already experienced Power BI users.
Benefits
- Improving and sustaining inter-BU exchanges;
- Improving the efficiency of report development - cross-functional work ;
- Streamline data collection, storage and sharing using a common tool;
- Automated data updating and report distribution, despite implementation in disconnected mode (ultimately totally transparent, with no constraints for end-users);
- Promotion of Power BI, enabling teams to better understand the importance of collaborating when handling data (global consistency, cross-functionality, etc.).
Next step
Accelerated adoption of Power BI :
- At Eurial level
- Large-scale roll-out (100 new users from September 2023)
- Improvement of support plan (specifications, templates, supervision, automation, etc.) - At Group level
- Group-wide reports shared with the various divisions
Setting up a unified Data base :
- BI storage standardization and accessibility
- Create a new storage space
- Definition of simplified data access as successor to offline mode
