How Eurial’s IT Department Helps Business Users Reclaim Their Data

Challenges

Within Eurial, the dairy branch of the Agrial Group, the deployment of Power BI represented a major milestone. The company aimed to align Power BI usage with a group-wide logic while ensuring the tool met specific business needs. This goal came with the necessity to spread best practices to foster standardized operations across the group.

In parallel, establishing governance was essential to guarantee the security, relevance, and quality of the data used in Power BI. Eurial also had to adapt the Power BI configuration to account for its diverse activities and specificities. Managing and controlling access to both the tool and the data represented another major challenge to ensure information confidentiality and security.

Eurial sought to make relevant data easily accessible to users, thereby promoting analysis and decision-making. The company therefore wanted to encourage user autonomy by providing a "self-BI" environment where users could explore and analyze data independently.

" Talan’s active collaboration on the implementation of Power BI was invaluable. We were able to deploy numerous projects thanks to the various skills provided by Talan's resources. " 

Guillaume HUCHET, BI Manager at Eurial

Method

Audit performance

• Disabling certain default parameters (out of 100+ existing ones) and maintaining vigilance as Microsoft releases new administration settings.

• Defining the policy for access and granted rights (by role, population, etc.).

• Restricting access to workspaces and implementing an organization by branch.

• Securing data access.

• Spreading and monitoring best practices.

Data Security

For historical and performance reasons, providing direct access to operational data was not desirable. Power BI was therefore deployed in "disconnected mode," using Excel sources only, hosted on a dedicated SharePoint.

Power BI Implementation

When a company implements Power BI, three scenarios are possible:

1. Users are 100% autonomous while IT remains a spectator.

2. Users maintain high autonomy with IT acting as a facilitator and supporting user needs.

3. IT governs, regulates, and creates the reports made available to users.

Eurial chose the second option—a hybrid mode—favoring user autonomy in report creation while occasionally having the IT teams build the most complex reports.

Employee Support

Hands-on workshops were established:

• First phase: Three pilot business units, followed by a gradual rollout to all departments. This allowed business teams to become autonomous in creating their reports and data models (Datasets).
• Second phase: Support for future users through workshops tailored to their level, whether they were complete beginners in BI projects or seasoned Power BI users.

Benefits

• Improved and sustainable exchanges between Business Units.

• Increased efficiency in report development through cross-functional work.

• Streamlined data collection, storage, and sharing via a common tool.

• Automated data updates and report distribution, despite the "disconnected mode" implementation (which ended up being totally transparent and constraint-free for end users).

• Promotion of Power BI, allowing teams to better perceive the importance of collaborating on data manipulation (global consistency, cross-functionality, etc.).

Next step

Accelerating Power BI Adoption:

• At the Eurial level: Large-scale rollout (100 new users starting September 2023) and improvement of the support plan (specifications, templates, monitoring, automation, etc.).

• At the Group level: Sharing of cross-functional reports from the Group to the various branches.

Implementing a Unified Data Foundation:

• Standardization and accessibility of BI storage.

• Creation of a new storage space.

• Definition of simplified data access to succeed the disconnected mode.