Client Overview
Official Aviation Guide (OAG) is a UK-based industry-leading travel data platform that’s been powering aviation intelligence since 1929. With nearly a century of experience, they deliver supply, demand, and pricing datasets via cloud-based APIs and analytics tools. OAG supports the global travel ecosystem by providing insights into flight schedules, status, connections, and historical performance, enabling more informed decision-making across airlines, airports, consultancies, finance, travel technology, and government agencies. Their offerings include nearly real-time data, analytics like the OAG Analyser suite, alerts, and comprehensive historical archives. Operating globally, from the UK headquarters to offices in the USA, Asia, and Lithuania, OAG powers billions of travel decisions each day through its rich, trusted data infrastructure.
Business Objective
The primary objective of the OAG is to migrate all existing reports and dashboards from Tableau to Microsoft Power BI. While migrating, they wanted to keep Snowflake as the central data source. The intent to migrate away from Tableau was to achieve seamless integration with other Microsoft products like Teams, Azure, and Excel, improve dashboard rendering speed, and reduce licensing costs.
Challenges Faced by the Client
Although OAG had an established reporting infrastructure with Tableau, several issues hindered business agility and user adoption:
- Slow rendering of dashboards built on a large Snowflake dataset.
- Tableau’s native integration with other Microsoft products, such as Teams and Excel, is weak.
- High licensing and maintenance costs during scaling.
- Users found Tableau less intuitive and more challenging to use.
- Tailoring reports for specific departments or user rules requires development efforts.
- Tableau has different user responses across web, desktop, and mobile platforms.
How NeosAlpha helped?
As part of the migration project, NeosAlpha played a critical role in ensuring a smooth and efficient transition from Tableau to Microsoft Power BI. Our approach combined technical expertise with a focus on performance, usability, and long-term scalability.
1. End-to-End Report Migration
We first carefully analyzed the existing Tableau dashboard of OAG to understand their KPIs, calculations, and data relationships.
We built the reports in Microsoft Power BI, enhancing usability and functionality wherever possible without disrupting the existing workflow. This approach preserved reporting continuity and avoided any disruption to business or users.
2. Snowflake Integration & Data Modeling
Since OAG wanted to continue using Snowflake as the primary data source, we built the entire transformation logic within Snowflake itself. This allowed Power BI to connect seamlessly, whether through Direct Query or Import mode, while ensuring that any future logic changes in Snowflake automatically flowed into the reports without requiring modifications in Power BI.
The choice of mode was based on the use case, balancing real-time data needs with performance considerations. This kept reporting both accurate and efficient.
3. Performance Optimization
To address the performance bottlenecks of Tableau dashboards, we tuned queries and streamlined data logic.
This approach of our Microsoft Power BI experts ensured faster rendering, quicker refresh cycles, and more responsive dashboards, even while working with large Snowflake datasets.
4. User Experience Enhancements
Recognizing that user adoption was low in Tableau, we designed interactive and role-based dashboards in Power BI.
Features like drill-throughs, slicers, and dynamic visuals made the reports more intuitive and tailored to each department’s needs, significantly improving self-service capabilities.
5. Validation & UAT Support
To ensure the efficiency of the new reporting system, our team ran a detailed reconciliation between Tableau and Power BI outputs.
This approach helped us ensure that the metrics are the same across both platforms. We also supported User Acceptance Testing (UAT), taking feedback from stakeholders to implement refinements.
6. Documentation & Knowledge Transfer
To ensure the OAG team can keep using the Microsoft Power BI efficiently, we created comprehensive documentation for each report covering data models, logic, and refresh processes.
7. Custom Solutions Delivered
- Snowflake Views: Designed and deployed custom views such as Product Configuration by Account, Not/Assigned Accounts, and Monthly Accounts. These modular views simplified reporting logic and improved reusability across multiple dashboards.
- Calculated Columns & Logic: Implemented calculated columns and append/merge operations directly in Power BI, reducing reliance on Tableau Prep Builder (which was less accessible to business users). This made reporting maintenance faster and easier.
- Discrepancy Resolution: Investigated mismatches between Tableau and Power BI metrics, such as Hits Count vs. Distinct Count. We identified the root cause and proposed Snowflake-based workarounds, ensuring reporting accuracy.
- Tableau Cloud Analysis: Conducted a deep review of Tableau Cloud reports (including XML/JSON API usage and Okta-OAG integration) to validate fields and permissions before replicating them in Power BI. This reduced migration risks and ensured data integrity.
Technology Stack
- Microsoft Power BI (Desktop, Service)
- Snowflake
- Tableau (Cloud, Prep Builder, Desktop—as part of legacy analysis and migration)
Results
Here is how the solution helped Tableau to migrate to Microsoft Power BI with zero downtime:
- Successfully created all 66 reports on Microsoft Power BI.
- Reports and dashboards loaded significantly quicker, offering near real-time insights.
- Seamless integration with other products, such as reports, was embedded directly into Teams and SharePoint.
- Reduced the licensing and infrastructure cost by 75%, while lowering dependency on central BI teams.
- Built Microsoft Power BI to scale, accommodate future report needs, and incorporate new data sources.
- OAG business teams gained the ability to create and customize reports independently, reducing turnaround time for insights.
