An end-to-end Microsoft Fabric and Power BI programme that moves Ivanhoe Mines’ reporting off spreadsheets and onto one governed platform, from geology and procurement to risk, finance and HR.
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics
Microsoft
Delivery partner
The results
Ivanhoe Mines develops and operates some of Africa’s largest mining projects, and in 2019 became the first mining company in the world to report its local procurement using the Mining Local Procurement Reporting Mechanism. Across procurement, geology, risk, finance and HR, much of its reporting still ran on Excel: files submitted by hand, in layouts that drifted from one submission to the next, then stitched together before anyone could read them. The numbers were slow to assemble and hard to trust, and each function solved the problem its own way. Ivanhoe wanted its data standardised and governed, its reporting automated, and one analytics platform that executives and operational teams could rely on as more of the business came onto it.
Every workstream follows the same path, so a new report starts on data that is already clean.
Sources
Excel submissions, finance and HR data, and external feeds.
Fabric pipelines
Scheduled pipelines land each source in OneLake.
Medallion architecture
Raw data lands in Bronze, is cleaned and conformed in Silver, and is shaped for each business question in Gold.
Governed by
Power BI
One governed model per subject, shared by every report built on it.
Power BI
Executive and operational views for each business function.
We started with a platform rather than a report. On Microsoft Fabric we built a shared foundation of OneLake, Fabric pipelines and a Bronze, Silver and Gold medallion architecture across lakehouses and a warehouse, then delivered each business function as its own workstream on top of it. Raw data lands in Bronze as it arrives. In Silver it is cleaned, typed and conformed, which is where the inconsistencies of hand-submitted spreadsheets get caught, and we worked with Ivanhoe on standard submission templates so fewer of them arrive in the first place. Gold shapes the data for each business question, and Power BI semantic models sit on top, so every dashboard in a function reads from one governed model. We built the dashboards with the people who use them: geology views for the technical teams, local spend and procurement reporting, enterprise risk dashboards for management, and finance and HR reporting. Behind it all we monitor workspace health, compute, pipelines and governance across the estate, and tune the platform as it grows.
Each business function is its own workstream, and all of them share the same governed foundation.
Where Ivanhoe spends, and with whom, reported from governed data instead of spreadsheets.
Geological data in dashboards for the technical teams. Formally handed over.
Risk reporting brought into dashboards for management and executives.
Finance data brought into OneLake on scheduled pipelines, ready to report on.
Workforce reporting on the same governed platform as everything else.
Workspace health, compute, pipeline and governance monitoring across hundreds of tables.
Fabric is now Ivanhoe’s enterprise data and analytics foundation, and the work has grown from a single project into a programme. The geology dashboards have been formally handed over, procurement and risk reporting keep growing with new requirements, and finance data ingestion and HR reporting run on the same platform. Reports that used to be assembled by hand from spreadsheets refresh from governed data, and executives and operational teams look at the same numbers. With hundreds of tables and data assets under monitoring, each new workstream starts on a platform that is already in place.
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