Case Study: Arla Foods achieves a centralized data foundation and boosts flexibility and productivity with Microsoft Power BI

Dairy company centralizes its data in Azure, gains flexibility and productivity

Arla Foods, the farmer-owned global dairy company, faced a fragmented “spaghetti” data landscape: thousands of siloed apps, duplicated data, and Power BI reports built on ad-hoc Excel extracts from SAP BW. Microsoft Power BI was widely used for visualization but became overloaded and unreliable because there was no single data foundation or standardized architecture to support enterprise reporting and analytics.

To fix this, Arla Foods built a centralized data foundation on Azure—using Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL Database, AKS and SQL Server—and moved reporting onto curated data marts and semantic models consumed in Microsoft Power BI. The new architecture eliminated duplicate pipelines, simplified Power BI models, restored capacity and performance, and unlocked use cases such as waste-reduction analytics, better production forecasting and cost-allocation insights—saving time and money and empowering business users to self-serve consistent, actionable data.

Arla Foods

Kasper Pors Hansen

Senior Manager