Client success stories

Fortescue is a global metal mining company headquartered in Australia. Fortescue focused on iron ore mining under the name of Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) until July 2023. As of 2017, Fortescue is the fourth-largest iron ore producer in the world. The company has holdings of more than 87,000 km2 in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, making it the largest tenement holder in the state, larger than both BHP and Rio Tinto.

Fortescue required an expert data-warehouse, data modeller, data transformation and report developer to build a solution for the Iron Bridge project, a Pilbura project with a budget of $4 billion Australian dollars. The Iron Bridge project manager required guidance as to what platforms would be most suitable for the project, with consideration to the restraints enforced by Fortescue IT. Cloud-based tools such as Azure Data Factory and Azure SQL database were ruled out due to the IT policy of Fortescue. Data was mainly stored in Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, so Fortescue required a toolset that could access these data sources. The immediate concern was to address these issues, and then once the project had reached a higher level of data maturity, to then build Power BI reports to provide the executive management with the ability to monitor metrics and key performance indicators using this data.

Data from multiple Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets needed to be loaded into a centralised database, ready to be transformed and modelled into a star schema format. The business intelligence tools of recommended by Ager BI were an Azure SQL Server, with three instances of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installed as DEV, TEST and PROD databases. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) was to also be installed to provide the extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities required to connect to Microsoft Access and Excel. Using this solution, the Iron Bridge team had full control over database management and data refresh schedules.

Using the cleansed and up-to-date accurate data, Power reports were developed to monitor metrics and key performance indicators to ensure that each sub-project was hitting milestones on time and within budget. It was essential to forecast spending against planned budget over the time of the project, so the forecasting functionality within Power BI enabled the Iron Bridge project manager to foresee spend with a 95% of accuracy based on historical data.

The solution provided the executive management team with a clear vision of the Iron Bridge project, using factual data to aid decision making and monitoring key performance indicators, financial expenditure, budgeting and forecasting. A key benefit is that the centralised database stores monthly versions of data, along with the defined business rules, resulting in a single source of truth for metrics and calculations. The Iron Bridge project now can utilise world-class Power BI reports to monitor mine development progress to keep the project within budget and on-time against set milestones. A reduction in the manual processing of data by automating data refreshes reduced human error, resulting in an increase in data quality, accuracy and efficiency.