Bildkälla: AI-genererad
The Swedish Football Association (SvFF) is Sweden's largest special sports federation tasked with promoting and administering football in Sweden. The organization has approximately 3,000 affiliated clubs with nearly one million members, of which about 600,000 are active players.
Challenge
Data-driven insights are a crucial part of the Swedish Football Association's (SvFF) digitalization strategy. However, despite having access to well-structured data (in SQL databases) and significant in-house expertise, they lacked data analysis in many decision-making documents. This resulted, among other things, in manual report creation that consumed a lot of time.
"Before we started this journey, it was a lot about SQL Server/ad hoc reports. An order would come in one day, and they wanted the data out by at least the next day, which, of course, was time-consuming. So one of the goals was to create better opportunities for self-service. We talked about an 80/20 goal where 80% of the reports would be ready or could be made by themselves, versus 20% ad hoc reports," says Mårten Johannesson, IT project manager at the Swedish Football Association.
Another challenge was that SvFF's source systems were used differently in different parts of the country, which meant that the data looked different. They also referred to things by different names, which created uncertainty when extracting the data.
Solution
In 2023, the Swedish Football Association (SvFF), together with Random Forest, launched a decision support project to improve data quality and create a better structure around report building. The project was based on Microsoft Fabric.
"The data platform we built consists of several components, including a Fabric Lake House and a Data Warehouse that stores the data. Then we created different flows to clean the data and make it analysis-ready. After this, SvFF could consume this data using Power BI and build various reports, which were finally presented in a Power BI app," says Aksel Uhr, BI consultant at Random Forest.
What SvFF got with Fabric was a comprehensive product for data analysis, where the data goes all the way from a Data Gateway through all the steps into Fabric and out to a Power BI report.
Business Benefits
With the Fabric platform, SvFF has now been able to enable a higher degree of self-service in the organization and limited the need for ad hoc reports. Important data and analyses can now be clearly visualized in an app that everyone has access to, which means that users now turn to SvFF for supplements rather than starting from scratch. This results in significant time savings.
They have also obtained more report-friendly data that is "the same every time" and developed common concepts so that everyone is talking about the same thing. Additionally, the solution has resulted in a higher level of awareness within the organization and the ability to gain insights in a way that was not possible before.
"Most importantly, it's about a better understanding of our own operations. One of the things we realized, for example, was that we have become more precise in understanding how many active associations we have. Instead of having dormant associations, we see how many are actually active in the operations and how it correlates to the number of players. We now see that we have larger associations with more players compared to before when there were more associations with fewer players. We hadn't really realized that before," says Johannesson.
The collaboration between Random Forest and SvFF is now in its second year, and the decision support project has been well received.
"It has been incredibly fun to work with a knowledgeable team that truly understands our operations and can quickly pick up on our needs. We are extremely pleased with the work so far and are in a much better position today than we were a couple of years ago!" concludes Johannesson.
