SNCF: More than 8,000 employees trained at PowerBI

For the past few years, SNCF Group (the French national railways) has used Power BI as the organisation’s main BI/reporting solution. Orsys and Experteam were chosen to implement a comprehensive training programme in order to improve employees’ skills and support the business lines implement various projects.

To address its data analysis needs across its various departments (HR, audit, production, finance, etc.) and manage the different levels of training required, SNCF, Orsys and Experteam have teamed up over the past four years to devise a training and support programme.

In order to provide everyone with the necessary tools for analysing data and creating their own decision-making aids, the project consisted of the following phases:

The first step involved implementing a complete face-to-face training programme on Power BI in 12 towns in France, and, since 2020, remote sessions:

• Introduction (1/2 day per trainee)
• “Getting started” (2 days per trainee)
• Advanced (2 days per trainee)

These training sessions, so far given to 8000 people, enabled the teams to ensure industrialised, reliable data processing – rather than using Excel spreadsheets, as was previously the case!

According to Jean-Christophe VERNHES, the Power Bi training courses enabled his team to carry out a number of projects by “pushing back the limits of a partially automated system, within a tight timeframe.”

After the SNCF teams improved their skills, our consultants then provided the client with post-training support to help users design their reporting tools.

We also provided the following:

A Power BI reporting for SNCF’s audit team (6 months) including:

• Monitoring dashboards for the group’s 1,200 subsidiaries
• Benchmarking the subsidiaries
• Detecting data with anomalies
• Compiling a report on the risk profile of the group’s subsidiaries
• A Power BI report for HR (3 weeks)
• Analysing payroll structures.
• Providing Management with interactive, automatic dashboards

SNCF now has a highly effective reporting solution regularly used by around 10,000 people, which ensures easier sharing of information across the group.