How BI Staff Augmentation Helped a Danish Company Resolve Reporting Issues with Strong Technical Power BI Skills

Orsted is a Danish renewable energy company, operating all over the globe.

It employs approximately 8,000 people and has been championing green energy solutions worldwide for over a decade. They specialize in the development, construction, and operation of both offshore and onshore wind farms, solar farms, energy storage facilities, and energy products.

Our client faced the urgent need for quick scaling up their analytic team, which has been overloaded with reports generated from many sources, including Azure Data Lake, SQL Server, SAP HANA, and SAP BW. They required a specialist with strong technical Power BI skills.

The client considered outsourcing reporting activities unfeasible. They also were not into recruiting an employee from the market, as the recruitment process takes a lot of time and resources, and is subject to potential pitfalls, for which the company didn’t have space in this situation.

Instead, they decided to explore the potential of staff augmentation service, as it would allow them to fill in the lacking resources very quickly and mitigate the risks associated with long-term employment or making the wrong choice. In fact, the primary benefit of staff augmentation lies in its capability to swiftly expand an organization’s workforce, all without necessitating the long-term commitment associated with hiring full-time employees. It can also be very cost-effective.

With the help of Power BI Expert, the client expected to solve the following challenges:

• Report Overloading: Existing reports suffered from performance issues due to composite models using numerous datasets, negatively impacting data retrieval from multiple sources.
• Design Complexity: Reports laden with multiple visualizations and intricate DAX measures led to slow performance, with loading times exceeding optimal thresholds.
• Data Processing Bottleneck: Handling large datasets with millions of rows in import mode led to daily data refresh challenges, without utilizing incremental refresh.
• Issue Resolution System: Users could report problems related to report refreshing and other development-related issues, necessitating ongoing resolutions.

The Client has chosen to enhance their internal team and inquired about the process with Algomine, which operates on Polish market, known for its well qualified IT workforce. Since Data Science Staff Augmentation is one of our expert fields, within a week we were able to offer a selection of verified candidates, with proven BI skills.

Another week later, an experienced BI Consultant was able to start his work for – and with – the client’s internal team, providing valuable insights throughout the project.

Our collaboration was structured around the following model:

• Staff Augmentation: A senior BI Expert from Algomine joined the client’s internal team for 12 months.
• Settlements: The pricing model was based on time and material (T&M) with flexible hourly rates.
• Expertise Utilization: Our Consultant brought expertise in BI tools focusing on Power BI and SAP Objects.
• Responsibilities: The Consultant took charge of Power BI premium capacity administration, user issue resolution, and optimization efforts.
• Agile Methodology: The collaboration operated under Agile principles, with well-defined responsibilities and regular sprint cycles.

The challenges were addressed through a multi-faceted approach:

• Utilizing tools such as DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, ALM toolkit, and SQL Management Studio, our expert pinpointed issues within Power BI datasets.
• Collaborating closely with end-users, the team optimized reports by consolidating visualizations and simplifying DAX measures.
• The strengthened team managed and administered Power BI premium capacity, addressing issues for Pro users and overseeing training for new team members.

The collaboration yielded impressive results:

• CPU capacity usage was reduced from 80-90% to 40-50% within 12 months, driven by meticulous analysis of reports and datasets.
• Visualizations per page were decreased from 40 to 10, with DAX measures refined for transparency and clarity.
• Approximately 100 reports and datasets were fixed, and training sessions were conducted to prevent future overloading issues.

Our BI Consultant proved well fitted to the client’s internal team: blended with the team members, accepted their collaboration style, and reinforced them on a daily basis to push the tasks forward.

By means of data science staff augmentation services,  we effectively supported client’s analytical team. That resulted in enhanced report performance, streamlined data management, and maximized capacity utilization.

All of that is readily accessible, practically on-demand, eliminating the need for time- and resource-intensive recruitment process, and allowing businesses to deliver innovations through their augmented teams while remaining lean.