Background

Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board is a statutory levy board, funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain, and managed as an independent organisation (independent of both commercial activity and of Government). The delivery of AHDB’s services to levy payers is focused on six sectors, covering about 72% of total agricultural output in the UK. The six sectors are Pork, Dairy, Beef & Lamb, Horticulture, Cereals & Oilseeds and Potatoes.

Problem

AHDB wanted to migrate its existing BI dashboards from Tableau to PowerBI and make best use of PowerBI so that market data and research findings are widely available in a format that allows more farmers and growers to get value from them. We were engaged in this project through G-Cloud procurement to undertake a feasibility study of Microsoft Power BI and ascertain if this software can meet AHDB’s reporting needs which at that time were met using Tableau. Subject to Microsoft PowerBI’s functionality and the results of the feasibility study, the Customer was to decide on full-scale migration to PowerBI.

Solution Approach

While AHDB used Tableau as its main data visualisation tool, the business made a decision to undertake a feasibility study of Microsoft PowerBI’s reporting and visualisation functionality. As a selected supplier for this exercise, we were tasked to:

  • Build up to five dashboards existing in Tableau, in Microsoft PowerBI
  • Ensure that Dashboards covers all the information and provide similar slicing and dicing and filter functionality as available in Tableau
  • Ensure the dashboards can automatically refresh
  • Ensure the dashboards are aligned with AHDB’s Office 365 company subscription
  • Deploy the dashboards for publication on external facing websites being mindful of data security and confidentiality

We developed the PowerBI reports using free Power BI desktop provided by Microsoft. The developed reports were deployed to AHDB’s Power BI’s subscription cloud using a Pro license. Then they were shared with other business users with different level of access i.e. report level and data level. The database refresh for the deployed reports is managed by Power BI gateway installed on local on-premise server. The data refresh frequency for reports is set to once a day which can be changed upon the business users’ needs. The PowerBI reports and dashboards allow different report and data security levels, as well as differentiation of roles and permitted access levels attributed to them. Additionally, the users can develop their own reports in the workspace and decide on the time when the data can be shared with other users.

Our solution and delivery optimised the Customer’s BI experience and helped save costs

Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board

We have successfully reached the goals set by the Customer.

The feasibility study has been a success and has become part of the ongoing full-scale migration project.