The Carmeuse group has more than 90 production sites, spread over 18 countries on different continents. Their current SAP BW cannot meet current needs sufficiently, which is why they decided to have element61 build a completely new BI Architecture. One that is future-proof and flexible in management as they regularly need to incorporate new start-up sites or need to integrate new source systems from acquisitions.
It was decided to work with TimeXtender and Microsoft technology. Both have already proved their added value in practice. TimeXtender provides the ETL, Microsoft provides the semantic model (via Tabular Model), the Business Intelligence reporting tools via Microsoft Power BI and Excel and for data enrichment and mapping, Master Data Services (MDS) is being used.
In a first phase, requirements analysis and data model design was done and developed/implemented via TimeXtender. Information is retrieved from the various source systems and consolidated into a staging database.
An important aspect was security, implemented via row-level security. Through integration with Active Directory, this is implemented at database level and further refined in the semantic model. In this way, standard reports are automatically adapted to show only data that the user is entitled to.
Microsoft Excel was still a very popular reporting tool, but in the meantime Carmeuse has recognized the power of Microsoft Power BI and is gradually introducing a new culture into their business.
Sales, Finance and Budget domains have already been developed and implemented and reports are available for the business user community.
In 2023 element61 started the migration of the on-premise TimeXtender Data Warehouse to Microsoft Analytics stack on Azure Cloud similarly using TimeXtender (though the latest version). The migration included a functional re-design using a Cloud-first set-up, optimization to the Cloud capabilities (scalability), some new requirements (leveraging a Data Lake) and a migration to Power BI Cloud for data visualization. element61 set up the technical architecture, lead the migration and ran both the analysis & implementation of the optimizations identified in the ETL to run at best capacity in the Cloud. The element61 team trained and coached the Carmeuse BI team.
