Data & Analytics — Fabric & Power BI

Modernising food safety analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Migrating approximately 130 business-critical reports from SAP BusinessObjects to a governed Microsoft analytics platform — without disrupting the day-to-day work of more than 100 staff.

reports migrated to Power BI: ~130
staff on the new platform: 100+
days of reporting downtime: 0

The challenge

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland is the State agency responsible for protecting public health through food safety regulation. Its reporting estate had grown up on SAP BusinessObjects — approximately 130 business-critical reports relied on by more than 100 staff across the organisation.

The platform was reaching the end of its useful life. Annual licensing costs were rising, the reporting estate had accumulated duplication over the years, and there was no clear route to the modern cloud and AI capabilities the organisation wanted to build towards. FSAI needed a migration that would modernise the platform without interrupting regulatory reporting people depend on every day.

Our approach

Rather than recreating 130 reports one-for-one, MedModus worked alongside FSAI's data and analytics team to first understand what was actually being used, and why. Reporting requirements were reviewed domain by domain, duplicate and redundant reports were consolidated, and the overall estate was simplified before anything was rebuilt.

Delivery was incremental. Each reporting domain was migrated, validated and handed over in turn, letting users move to the new platform gradually rather than facing a single high-risk cutover. Training, documentation and knowledge transfer ran throughout the engagement rather than being left to the end — the goal from day one was an FSAI team that could maintain and extend the platform independently.

The solution

The new platform is built on Microsoft Power BI with Microsoft Fabric capabilities. Power Query handles data transformation, and a centralised Power BI semantic model provides a single source of truth — so business logic is defined once and applied consistently across every report.

A structured Development, Test and Production environment supports safe, governed report development, with access managed through Microsoft Entra ID. The result is a platform that is secure and controlled today, and positioned for the broader Microsoft Fabric capabilities — including AI-powered analytics — that FSAI can adopt as they mature.

“The phased approach meant our teams never lost access to the reporting they rely on — and we came out of it with a platform we can run ourselves.”

Data & Analytics team, Food Safety Authority of Ireland

Outcomes

What changed for the organisation once the platform was live.

~130 reports
migrated to Power BI
Reduced licensing
costs annually
Secure access
via Microsoft Entra ID
Reports consolidated
to remove duplication
100+ staff
onboarded to the new platform
Semantic model
as a single source of truth
Dev / Test / Prod
governance structure
Fabric-ready
foundation for future scale

Facing a similar challenge?

We will walk you through how this engagement was delivered and what the equivalent first phase would look like for your organisation.

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