As one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, the client relied heavily on accurate reporting to make data-driven decisions for its eight ($1 billion+) brands.Â
Historically, they were using Power BI Pro licenses for development and sharing content, a method that does not scale as efficiently and is not as cost-effective as leveraging Premium Capacity.Â
Because the client is a global organization, they have several business groups that require their own Power BI Premium Capacity and need assistance setting up the infrastructure within Power BI to support all of their reporting needs.Â
In addition to setting up the Premium Capacity, another challenge was seamlessly integrating with their Snowflake environment so that viewers of the dashboards could leverage single sign-on (SSO).
phData was chosen for this project due to our expertise in both Power BI from a development and administrative perspective as well as our deep institutional knowledge of Snowflake.
After advising the client to utilize Power BI Premium (Gen2) over Azure Analysis Services, phData began by assisting in selecting the appropriate SKU for their Power BI Premium Capacity.Â
Different SKUs allow for different levels of storage capacities, therefore selecting the right SKU for the use case after holding capacity planning sessions with the business groups was a critical step.Â
Since Azure SSO for Snowflake was a requirement, hosting Power BI Gateways on virtual machines (VMs) is necessary. phData made recommendations for the correct size VMs that could handle the workload.Â
After the VMs were selected and gateways installed, phData deployed a Power BI workspace architecture strategy to three business groups that allow their developers and admins to seamlessly develop Power BI content while offering self-service capabilities to end users.Â
Self-service in this context refers to the ability for users to use the dashboards pertinent to them and access the underlying data to those dashboards. To manage the promotion of content through a standard development lifecycle, phData built Power BI Deployment Pipelines.Â
Finally, phData held enablement sessions on Power BI development and management best practices to ensure the client team was self-sufficient.Â
The client now has a Power BI Premium Capacity for four strategic business groups with dozens of developers and several hundred end users. Users not only can view business-critical dashboards but can also access the underlying dataset when building their own ad hoc reporting.Â
In addition to this, comprehensive guides were provided so that the processes performed could be replicated for other groups throughout the organization. Before the project finished, open office hours and enablement sessions were held for developers to get fully up to speed on how to appropriately and most efficiently leverage Power BI.
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