Vlaamse Waterweg, an agency of the Flemish Government, manages the waterways in Flanders, including traffic management, bridge and lock management, permit allocation for waterfront events, and water capacity applications. They asked competence centre Cloubis to help them optimise their data reporting.
Although Vlaamse Waterweg was already using Power BI for both operational and strategic reporting, the current approach was not manageable or scalable. Employees installed Power BI themselves, accessed source data and created reports directly on the source system, without applying best practices. This led to performance problems and security and management issues, resulting in many end-user queries about incorrect data or unclear reports.
To address these challenges, an information management team was established within Vlaamse Waterweg, focusing on managing strategic data solutions. In collaboration with Cloubis, they worked on a modern cloud data architecture via Azure Synapse Analytics and the implementation of a scalable self-service reporting solution in Power BI.
Xploration
Vlaamse Waterweg needed support in optimising their data reporting in a clear and well-organised way.
Our solution
- An end-to-end Azure Synapse Analytics data platform where data processing is organised following the 3-layer Medallion architecture.
- A managed self-service reporting framework in Power BI.
Integration
- Azure Synapse Analytics (Synapse Pipelines, Spark notebooks, Data Lake, Serverless SQL Pools).
- Power BI.
- Azure DevOps for code versions and setting up release and deployment pipelines.
Result
After implementing the Azure data platform, Vlaamse Waterweg was able to centralise key data and process it into valuable strategic information. Those insights are shared via centrally managed Power BI Workspaces. The established reporting framework also supports self-service BI, allowing authorised Power BI users to develop, customise and share reports themselves.
