Challenge
At Endress+Hauser, within just a few months, Power BI grew from a local initiative into an analytics platform used worldwide. This created a growing need for structured knowledge sharing and common standards.
Solution
Together with ALTYCA, Endress+Hauser developed a scalable community approach and rolled it out globally. At its heart is the data community, which brings together technical expertise and strategic perspectives.
Benefit
The data community connects employees worldwide, accelerates knowledge sharing and embeds common data standards across the organisation. With this scalable community approach, Power BI has become much more than a tool: it is now the foundation of a company-wide data culture.
How do you share knowledge at scale when more and more people are working with the same technology? Sooner or later, many organisations face this question. New tools gain traction and more teams build experience, yet knowledge often remains trapped in silos. Effective solutions are developed multiple times, mistakes are repeated, and standards tend to emerge by chance rather than through a coordinated approach.
At Endress+Hauser, this pattern was taking shape around self-service business intelligence – and Power BI in particular. It started small: employees in production at the Reinach site were looking for a tool to complement their existing SAP solutions for specific analysis and visualisation tasks.
What began with a handful of people quickly gained momentum. Five users became ten, then twenty, then thirty. More and more teams, from production to marketing and sales, discovered how Power BI could help them analyse and visualise data independently and put it to use in their day-to-day work.
As Power BI adoption grew, so did the need to share knowledge across teams and locations. In a company with more than 18,000 employees, this called for a structure that would enable collaboration, bring together experience and provide guidance. ALTYCA, which had supported Power BI adoption in Reinach from the outset, proposed building a Power BI community – extending the approach from a small group to the entire organisation.
Together, ALTYCA and Endress+Hauser designed the community to meet a range of needs: regular peer-to-peer exchange, support with technical questions and a strategic perspective on new developments. They complemented this with focused, full-day Power BI training sessions to help spread knowledge throughout the organisation.
«ALTYCA enabled us to turn a local Power BI initiative into a global data community. Their strategic foresight, deep technical expertise and practical learning formats helped us share our analytics knowledge at scale worldwide – and made collaboration between locations a key success factor.»
A cornerstone of the community is the Power BI Touch-Base Call. Once a month, ALTYCA experts meet with Power BI enthusiasts and other interested colleagues from Endress+Hauser for an hour-long discussion of new Power BI and Microsoft Fabric features, project experiences and best practices. When needed, they move straight into hands-on problem-solving, exploring code, data models, architecture questions and specific solutions together.
The Data Analytics Quarterly Talks add a strategic perspective to this practical exchange. Expert insights and guest presentations help the community assess which developments will matter and which lessons can be applied in other areas.
This is particularly important at Endress+Hauser, where Power BI is part of a broader data landscape. SAP Analytics Cloud is used primarily for financial data, while Snowflake plays a central role as a data platform. The community therefore helps people understand both how to implement solutions and which tool is best suited to a particular purpose.
These conversations also contribute to a growing knowledge base. As part of a structured approach to knowledge management, insights from projects are brought together, discussed and documented as reusable standards – for visual design, data models, workspace architectures, deployment pipelines and governance. In this way, a successful solution developed by one team becomes an approach that many others can benefit from.
Today, around 1,800 people at Endress+Hauser use Power BI. With ALTYCA’s support, this has grown into an active data community that connects employees, makes knowledge accessible and establishes self-service BI as a lasting part of the organisation.
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