Enabel is the Belgian development agency of the Belgian federal government. They implement the governmental cooperation of the Belgian government in its 14 partner countries.
Furthermore, Enabel contributes to sustainable development in the least developed countries, mainly Africa. Some examples are climate change & environment, mobility, peace & security, social & economic inequality.
Depending on the project, Enabel is active in different sectors. Projects can focus on digitalization, energy, gender, health, agriculture, education, etc.
Enabel would like to gather insights about data that resides in different systems. In the initial solution, there were frequent problems with:
We noticed that the limits of the initial set-up of reporting were reached: structure was missing, refresh was unreliable, transformations were difficult to maintain and not all reporting needs were met.
We, from Cloubis, developed and proposed a plan that fit within Enabel’s data architecture and needs. Our goal: to set up a state-of-the-art data platform (incl. data model) on which reporting can be done easily and efficiently from different perspectives of the organization.
This resulted in our targets:
Cloubis provided an efficient and scalable data platform in the cloud (Azure native). We extracted the data from the different systems on a daily basis, transformed it and provided it in an appropriate data model (Kimball). In addition, we helped Enabel to set up their reporting needs and provide governance in terms of reporting.
On a weekly basis we discuss the status and determine the priorities together with the customer. We follow up on these in Azure DevOps. In tandem (teams of 2), we translate the business needs into concrete actions and each consultant focuses on a different area:
Since we now connect directly to the data sources as much as possible, we can bring in data faster and more efficiently. In addition, we built the data model to meet current reporting needs and to be scalable into the future.
During the project we used the following Microsoft technologies:
By creating the above architecture for Enabel, we were able to:
Cloubis succeeded, by implementing self-service BI, in making Enabel more data-driven as more end-users use the central data platform.
Upon completion of the project, we can say that there is an impact in terms of:
“It has been a pleasure working with the experts from Cloubis. We are very satisfied with the implementation that has been done for us: it is tailored to our needs, cost efficient and easy to maintain.”
Lennert Belmans – ICT Architect