A global renewable energy leader partnered with us to enhance their pricing capabilities using Databricks, improving revenue efficiency and overcoming data challenges to optimize financial decisions.
Transforming data searchability for a major bottler leveraging Microsoft Power Platform
Through a customized interface, we enabled employees at a major corporation’s subsidiary to efficiently find relevant reports. By utilizing metadata tagging and advanced search metrics, we streamlined report discovery, significantly reducing search times. Our solution seamlessly integrated with existing systems, such as Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and SharePoint lists, minimizing disruptions to workflows. Our client now has a comprehensive tool that meets immediate needs and offers scalability.
Client Snapshot
Who:
Beverage distribution company
Industry:
Manufacturing
Stakeholders:
Enterprise research & analytics team
Technology and software:
Power BI, Rest APIs, SharePoint lists, and Power Apps
Work Summary
What we did:
- Evaluated the company’s existing data organization strategy to discern its strengths and opportunities to improve.
- Optimized and consolidated multiple AWS and Databricks accounts, ensuring a cost-effective and seamless infrastructure.
- Conducted a thorough analysis of data privacy and data estate, introducing an ingestion tagging framework to categorize new data and bolster security measures.
- Ensured the client’s infrastructure is future-proofed, enabling seamless acquisitions and incorporation of diverse data types.
- Installed the Lakehouse Optimizer powered by Blueprint to gain valuable insight into their Databricks usage patterns.
Client background
Our client is a renowned beverage distribution company that operates globally. It is a major player in the non-alcoholic beverage industry, with a focus on manufacturing, marketing, and distributing a diverse range of popular soft drinks. The company has established itself as a key player in the market, contributing significantly to the availability and accessibility of various beverages across different regions. With a commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, our client has built a strong reputation for delivering refreshing and iconic beverages without compromise. Their wide-scale reach includes over 7,200 associates operating in more than 10 states across the Unites States.
The Blueprint way
The goal of this project was to create a tailored solution that met the client’s current needs while allowing room for future growth. The result was a comprehensive tool that seamlessly integrated with Power BI, engineered for scalability to automatically incorporate new Power BI reports as they are published to the Power BI service, leveraging REST APIs and enriched metadata from Power Apps SharePoint form. This tool offers precise search and discovery through an extensive list of Power BI Reports. Thanks to its advanced and customizable meta-data capture utilizing Power Apps to categorize, classify and tag reports, the tool simplifies the discovery process, making it effortless and efficient for users to locate the reports and insights they need.
The challenge
Our client faced challenges in efficiently navigating their expanding catalog of Power BI reports. When employees sought reports to meet their data insights criteria, the search results were often limited and failed to accurately represent the breadth of reports available. Their existing search metrics restricted searches to exact matches in titles, owners, and refresh dates, leading to difficulties in finding relevant information. As new reports were added regularly across multiple workspaces, the manual search process grew increasingly time-consuming. To address this, the Blueprint team was tasked with developing an interface to streamline and enhance search functionality, aiming for more specific searches and productive results.
The solution
The project began with an evaluation of the client’s existing systems, then proposing the utilization of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and SharePoint lists. A Power BI report was implemented as the interface, providing clear navigation for finding reports published to the Power BI service. To provide metadata for existing reports, Power BI REST API data that was available in client’s SQL warehouse was utilized, ensuring daily updates of report names, pages, workspace information, and report usage was fed to SharePoint lists. Power Apps forms were integrated into these lists, offering the ability to capture detailed report synopses, custom tags creation, and a layered taxonomy to categorize reports. Additionally, representative report images were incorporated to enhance the user experience.
Impact
- A flexible and efficient architecture was developed for report data storing and tagging.
- A clean and simple dashboard was created, easy to navigate for employees, facilitating quick searches for relevant reports.
- Employees were enabled to search and find all needed information, and faster, with confidence in its accuracy. There were nearly 700 active users recorded in 2023.
- The client's system was enhanced to be flexible and scalable, capable of growing with their data.
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