Partena Professional
How Partena Professional leverages data integration and visualization tools to foster a data-driven culture.
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How Partena Professional leverages data integration and visualization tools to foster a data-driven culture.
Challenges
How we helped
Success factors
A data vision close to the business
At Partena Professional—a Belgian HR, payroll, and business services provider supporting 135,000 self-employed and 81,000 companies—leadership believed data should not exist in isolation. From early on, the data team was embedded in the business, positioned close to operations rather than in a distant IT silo.
Their mission? To translate raw data into meaningful, operational insights that help managers, sales, and services make well-grounded decisions.
Battling siloed thinking and intuition-driven decisions
Despite a wealth of data, many decisions across the organization still relied heavily on gut feel. The leadership knew this had to change.
The challenge wasn’t obtaining data—it was making it accessible, understandable, and aligned with everyday business needs. Their approach was clear: deliver qualitative operational and market data in formats people could use.
Forging the technical foundation
Under the hood, Partena’s BI setup is sophisticated. They run on Microsoft SQL Server with ETL handled by SQL Server Integration Services, and data modeling based on Data Vault 2.0. Over that, a custom data platform supports business logic, and Tableau provides the visualization layer.
But integrating all those parts into a coherent, performant system—especially one safe enough for self-service access—required skillful orchestration.
Partena Professional is a service provider with a strong focus on entrepreneurship and personnel management. Partena Professional supports and accompanies start-ups, SMEs and large companies in their administrative procedures and HR policy.
Partena Professional is a service provider with a strong focus on entrepreneurship and personnel management. Partena Professional supports and accompanies start-ups, SMEs and large companies in their administrative procedures and HR policy.
"We have purposely put the data experts close to the business to deliver real added value for our colleagues, customers, and partners. Our team's mission is to support and promote a data-driven culture within the company and our customers. We give them access to qualitative operational data and market-oriented data and provide them with the information they need to make decisions and enhance processes."
"We have purposely put the data experts close to the business to deliver real added value for our colleagues, customers, and partners. Our team's mission is to support and promote a data-driven culture within the company and our customers. We give them access to qualitative operational data and market-oriented data and provide them with the information they need to make decisions and enhance processes."
Making “terrifying data” intuitive
Partena recognized that many business users would feel intimidated by complex data systems. They chose Tableau because of its intuitive interface—it allowed users to explore beyond flat lists into dynamic visualizations.
Behind the scenes, 15 “power users” maintain the datamarts and raw data access; hundreds of other users can safely explore that data via dashboards. To protect against mistakes, the system is carefully governed, enforcing rules to avoid misuse.
Avoiding the one-team bottleneck
As the system rolled out organization-wide, one insight became clear: if all analysis is funneled through a central BI team, that team becomes a bottleneck—and may miss domain knowledge embedded in the business itself.
So Partena’s leadership decided to train and empower departmental “power users” who could support their own colleagues and reduce dependence on the central team. This decentralized model helps ensure insights are closer to the decision-makers.
Partnering for expertise
The journey had its fair share of technical roadblocks. Early workshops with Biztory revealed key gaps—particularly how to export data securely from legacy systems and implement robust Row Level Security (RLS).
Biztory’s deep hands-on experience across BI tools helped Partena design an efficient, scalable security architecture. This partnership saved time, reduced risk, and gave Partena confidence in their infrastructure.
Embedding analytics across the organization
Today, Tableau dashboards are part of nearly every department’s day-to-day workflow. Sales teams reference dashboards in meetings to define next steps, marketing leverages them to blend customer and market data, and leadership tracks financials and departmental costs.
Over half the users engage daily with dashboards—proof of how deeply analytics are woven into operations.
Looking forward —from reporting to insight services
Partena doesn’t see this as the end of the road. Static dashboards are no longer enough for their vision. The next frontier is giving customers direct access to analytics—letting them combine Partena’s data with their own to generate predictive and prescriptive insights.
That shift represents both a challenge and opportunity: it can unlock new value streams and deepen relationships with their clients.
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