Pets at Home - Data Journey from Tableau to PBI / Nat van Gulck - PBI Inspector

When: Thursday 21st March 2024
Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt
Location: Number 1 Spinningfields, 1 Hardman Street, Manchester, M3 3EB
Session will not be streamed over MS Teams
Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters

March's PBIMCR will feature Pets at Home's Chris Elton & Brook Bracewell and Nat Van Gulck.

Pets at Home “The Journey from Tableau to Power BI self-service”

• As-Is describing our Tableau viz solution on data sets supporting reporting
• Setting the Standards
• Themes
• Governance & Control
• Dax Standardisation
• Domain based semantic models
• How we identified the domains
• Aspiring to few models supporting many reports
• -Considerations on when to use direct query with GCP (Drill throughs) – demo hopefully with some example costs reporting
• - Challenges on how to aggregate we have distinct counts over time
• Source control
• Deployment Patterns
• Demo pushing a semantic model to git source control explain how azure dev ops is slicker but out of scope
• Demo updating measures on a deployed model using git and ALM tool kit
• Demo moving from dev to prod using power bi pipelines

Bio:
Brook Bracewell
Brook has nearly a decade of experience in data analytics, with a focus on data modelling, SQL, and DAX. Over the past 14 months at Pets at Home, Brook has been developing the Data Warehouse on Google Cloud Platform, specialising in optimising models for Power BI self-service. This role builds on Brook's extensive background in data warehouse implementations and Power BI deployments across various sectors, supporting both small and large enterprises. With a career history as a business analyst, project manager, and operational lead, Brook brings a wealth of expertise to the table in a pragmatic and experienced manner.

Chris Elton has over 10 years experience in BI, mostly working in healthcare and recently moving into retail at Pets. Chris has worked as a BI Analyst, developing dashboards to deliver value and add insight to the business, with a primary focus on customer experience. More recently he has led tool migrations to Power BI, with a user first approach; gaining stakeholder buy in and driving a cultural shift.

PBI Inspector with Nat Van Gulck:

Testing the visual layer of Power BI reports has usually been a manual task. Thanks to the new Power BI Project file format however there is an opportunity to automatically check for visuals' issues around accessibility, consistency and performance and thereby align with your organizations Power BI Centre of Excellence guidelines. In this session we will see how PBI Inspector, an open-source community tool, supports this process.

About Nat:
I started my career over twenty years ago as a .NET Software Developer while also developing an interest for Data Visualization. This led me to work on Qlik and Tableau data projects. Then Power BI became so compelling that I had to join Microsoft. As a Cloud Solutions Architect I help customers be successful with Power BI; PBI Inspector is part of this endeavour. The adventure continues with Microsoft Fabric.

PBI Inspector GitHub repository -- https://github.com/NatVanG/PBI-Inspector
Tutorial: PBI Inspector as part of an Azure DevOps pipeline: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/projects/projects-build-pipelines