Databricks User Group Belgium

Join us for the 13th edition of our meetup, filled with insightful sessions on Databricks, great company, and drinks & bites. As always, expect the same great format: a food & drinks reception, two sessions, and a laid-back closing drink.

📍 Location:
Volvo Trucks Gent - Gate 5 (Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/bFHgktuovZxaagYQ7)
Smalle Heerweg 31
9041 Gent
You will have to authenticate yourself at the gate to enter. No entry possible after 19h30 (gate is closed!).

🚅 How to get there?
The event venue is easy to reach by car. Parking is available at the office, including EV charging stations. Traveling by public transport is possible? Take the train to Gent Dampoort and the bus towards Oostakker.

🕡 Schedule:

• 18:00: Welcome with food & drinks by Growing Pai
  Doors open, grab a drink and a bite as we get started!
• 19:00 - 19:40: Taming the Data Platform Zoo at Volvo Group: Scaling dbt + Databricks Across 20+ Teams
  At the upcoming Databricks Meetup, we’ll showcase how Volvo Group tackles the complexity of operating a large-scale, multi-team data platform.
  With over 20 teams owning their own domains and deploying independent Databricks workloads, the platform risks evolving into an unstructured ecosystem. The challenge: enforce consistency, governance, and maintainability while still enabling team autonomy — and ensure platform-wide changes can be rolled out efficiently.

We will demonstrate how Volvo Group addresses this by standardizing development through an opinionated template that generates production-ready Databricks Bundle and dbt projects. This setup includes built-in environment lifecycle management, per-team catalog isolation, CI/CD pipelines, and automated data quality monitoring.

Beyond the architecture, we’ll dive into the real operational challenges: keeping templated projects aligned over time, embedding platform conventions into reusable components, and orchestrating job graphs that execute only what is necessary.
This session offers a concrete, large-scale industry example of how to bring structure, scalability, and governance to a rapidly growing Databricks ecosystem.

By Samuël Delefortrie, Data Architect @ Volvo Trucks

• 19:50 pm - 20:30 pm: From Paper Surveys to GenAI: Building a RAG-Powered Quality Assistant on Azure Databricks for Volvo's Manufacturing Floor
  When trucks roll off the assembly line with a defect, every minute spent identifying the root cause matters.
  At Volvo's European Medium Duty Business Unit, quality retouchers at the Blainville plant were manually sifting through paper-based surveys to diagnose recurring issues in an inefficient process prone to knowledge loss and human error.

In this session, we'll walk through how we designed and deployed a production-grade Generative AI solution on Azure Databricks (UDP) that transforms this workflow end to end. The core of the solution is a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture: historical survey data is vectorized, indexed via Azure AI Search, and served through an Azure OpenAI-backed assistant. All orchestrated within the Unified Data Platform.

Whether you're building your first enterprise RAG pipeline or scaling GenAI on Databricks, this session gives you a concrete, real-world reference architecture to take back to your team.

By Fouad Kichauat*, Data en AI Architect @ Volvo Trucks*

• 20:30 - 21:30: Networking & Drinks
  End the night with casual drinks and great conversations!
  Note that we will all have to leave together at 21h30 due to the security restrictions at the office.

🚀 Be part of our 13th meetup - RSVP now and join the community!