With a robust data warehouse and a Microsoft Power BI environment under active management, you can rest assured: CONO Kaasmakers has data and analytics well in place. Therefore, it was time for the next step in data management. Together with Riviq, CONO implemented a Power BI Governance dashboard, for even more visibility and grip on the Power BI environment.
CONO Kaasmakers is a cooperative of dairy farmers, known for cheese brands such as Beemster® cheese, Stompetoren and Amsterdam Cheese Company. With over four hundred members, the cooperative is among the smaller cheese makers in the Netherlands.
CONO Cheesemakers is strongly committed to animal welfare and sustainability and, of course: the tastiest cheese. It all starts with the cooperation between cows, farmers and cheesemakers. Every link is important to CONO, because together you can achieve more than each one on its own. Moreover, this way you can continuously improve. And that also applies when talking about data management.
Next step in data management
"In our cheese factory, we work with state-of-the-art equipment that provides important data," says Rick Visser, Program Manager for Business Insights at CONO Kaasmakers. "A few years back, Riviq helped us unlock all that data and extract management information from it." As a result, CONO has a future-proof data architecture on which the cheese maker itself can develop management reports. "Every day we extract many important insights from this," Visser continued. "A logical next step was to professionalize our data management. An important part of that is knowing how and how often Power BI reports are used by colleagues."
Understanding how to use Power BI
In fact, CONO employees are eagerly using Power BI. "We saw colleagues exporting data to Excel to add other data to it to get even more insights," Visser explains. "But yes, of course we can take care of that just fine in Power BI. You only discover those kinds of workarounds from colleagues when you have visibility into what's happening in Power BI. Riviq then came up with the idea to further develop their concept for a Power BI Governance dashboard together."
"There was real co-creation. Putting our heads together and coming up with the best result together, we both get a lot of energy from that."
Rick Visser, Program Manager Business Insights, CONO Cheese Makers
Better tailoring to information needs
Riviq already had a well-developed dashboard ready. "We further developed that concept in co-creation with data and information needs from CONO," Visser says. Among other things, the Power BI Governance dashboard shows how many workspaces are in use per department, how many reports there are and which are actively used.
"We see which users are using which reports, and also which reports are precisely not being used," Visser continues. "That's not to control colleagues, but to learn how we can better align reports with information needs or provide better guidance.
Moreover, it is a pity to invest time and money if reports go unused. The dashboard provides a starting point to engage with colleagues about how reports are or are not helping them. This allows us to adjust or improve reports."
In co-creation to the best result
CONO and Riviq have been working together for years, because Riviq handles the management and further development of the data platform and the Power BI environment. Visser: "That goes very well, Riviq is very accessible and has a lot of knowledge."
This project gave a new dimension to that collaboration. "There was real co-creation. We are used to learning things from Riviq. And Riviq was now also learning things from us. That was a pleasant interaction. Putting our heads together and arriving at the best result together, that's where we both get a lot of energy.
So together we arrived at a product that is of great use to us, and that Riviq can also use with other clients."
Transparency thanks to Power BI Governance
CONO has been using the dashboard for several months now. It yielded immediate results. "We saw reports pop up that we didn't even know existed," Visser reveals. "We also discovered that some colleagues could transfer reports to the production environment, when that was not the intention.
In addition, we now have an excellent picture of usage. Colleagues turned out to consult a simple report as many as ten times a day. While another report, which we had created exclusively for a few colleagues, was barely used. So this Power BI Governance dashboard makes everything very transparent."
CONO plans to comprehensively evaluate the outcome of this dashboard twice a year. Visser: "Together with Riviq and some Power BI users within CONO. In order to structurally optimize our reporting and Power BI environment."
On to self-service BI
For CONO, the dashboard is an important first initiative towards structured data management. And that is necessary to achieve the desired scenario in the field of data and analytics. "That is self-service BI," Visser explains. "The basis for that is an environment in which all data is continuously of good quality and in which a few standard reports provide the right insights.
Additional data must then be available within a controlled environment so that our people can enrich reports themselves and run analyses on them. I expect Riviq and CONO to make this another great project."