AI from Pilot to Scale
Asmodee streamlines its Data Platform and its use of Power BI
"With Talan’s support, we also realised that we could optimise our usage, because modern solutions are often delivered by their vendors without any information on the impact of opening them up to all users"
Sébastien Mars, Chief Data Officer, asmodee
The Challenge
Founded in 1995, asmodee is a French company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange since 2025. Over the years it has become the largest board game distribution network and a publisher of iconic games such as CATAN and TTR, with revenue of €1.3 billion in 2024. Present in 27 countries with 2,300 employees, the group sold more than 110 million games in 2023. Until recently it grew through acquisitions, which left it with a rather heterogeneous information system.
The strategy to rationalise this legacy was to create a group IT department, centralise the data of the various entities in a Data Platform and start a project to rationalise its ERPs around SAP S/4 Hana. Sébastien Mars, Chief Data Officer of asmodee, heads a team of 11 people. Power BI had been used for reporting for several years, but in 2024 asmodee decided to question its foundations, which were then a SQL Server data warehouse. The group wanted more performance and scalability, and the ability to exploit its data through AI and machine learning.
The question also arose of whether to reconsider Power BI itself, used in a very open way, while keeping the benefits of the autonomy of the 26 subsidiaries on data. Usage was a concern too: when the current Chief Data Officer took up the role, Power BI regularly suffered major slowdowns despite its autoscale function, and modern solutions are often delivered by their vendors without any warning about the cost of opening them up to all users.
The Solution
To renew its foundations, asmodee first deployed Databricks, and all its data was consolidated in a data lake on Azure. The Chief Data Officer chose to focus on the Data Platform, on building a portfolio of group reports and on creating a data community. With Talan’s support, a relationship dating back to an audit that followed the merger of two Azure tenants in June 2024, the company then optimised its usage. Talan’s teams showed that, with certain optimisations, asmodee could stay on its current capacities.
The team led by Jean-Philippe Lobo, data project manager at Talan, removed unused or under-used resources using a tool that identifies fields present in the models but unused in the reports. It also orchestrated processing to smooth the peaks on Azure and optimised Power BI licences, removing, with a lot of explanation, certain professional licences for employees who only performed refresh operations. This step made it possible to define a trajectory and a budget while staying at the same capacity on Microsoft Fabric.
Following a change to Power BI licensing at the end of 2024, the Power BI capacity was migrated to Fabric, with a data lake on Azure storage forming a lakehouse with Databricks. Started in May 2025 and completed in July of the same year, the migration took place in two phases: scheduled reports first, then custom reports, for which Talan provided users with a detailed procedure. Monitoring of capacities and usage was then put in place, relying on a third-party tool, Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring (FUAM), supplemented by in-house developments and by a reporting layer listing all Power BI reports, their usage, owners and sources. An automation developed by Talan will eliminate reports that run for too long. Finally, Talan is carrying out a feasibility study on business continuity for the Data Platform, with automatic failover to a standby capacity in another Azure zone.
The Impact
By staying on its current capacities, asmodee was able to define a trajectory and a budget for its move to Microsoft Fabric. The clean-up exposed reports built on semantic models of 400 columns that used only 20, and the licence review removed certain licences that were not needed. The migration to Fabric, started in May 2025, was completed in July of the same year. Since good practices have been generalised, the Chief Data Officer says Power BI freezes less often, except of course when Azure itself is down, as it was last summer.
Monitoring of capacities and usage will soon go as far as blocking users who endanger the platform’s performance, and the proof of concept has just been completed, with the implementation of the tool to follow. The planned catalogue of Power BI reports should help teams avoid reproducing what already exists and rely as much as possible on group reports. As Sébastien Mars points out, no company needs 1,000 different reports. Without reducing the autonomy of the subsidiaries, the data team is driving a rationalisation effort; without it, the assets developed would soon become unmaintainable.
Elsewhere in the group, asmodee has already automated its accounting close processes, bringing the publication of its results down to 5 days. Business continuity is the next step. The feasibility study entrusted to Talan leads into a project for asmodee’s next fiscal year, starting in April, when Power BI developments will also move to a DevOps approach, already used for the rest of the Data Platform. Once again, this is a way of harmonising how asmodee operates by aligning with market best practices.