How ACTLAB shares Power BI with 52 users while avoiding roughly 50 Power BI licenses

About ACTLAB

ACTLAB is an independent testing lab for the cannabis industry. Its clients are mostly growers and product manufacturers who turn plant material into pre-rolls, edibles, concentrates and topicals. ACTLAB tests for potency, terpenes, pesticides, heavy metals, microbials and mycotoxins, so clients can prove their product meets state regulations. At the Danish site, that means GMP.

Samplers collect product at client sites and drive it back to the lab. Turnaround time is everything.

The challenge

ACTLAB had already built its own portal on SharePoint to share Power BI reports. It worked, but every viewer needed a Power BI license.

It's not only crazy expensive, but it's also entirely inefficient, because everyone needs at least a basic understanding of how Power BI works.

Rees Nemeth, Senior Accountant & Financial Analyst, ACTLAB

As Senior Accountant & Financial Analyst, Rees owns both the reporting and analytics behind it. The old setup scored badly on both. It was also risky: to see a report, users needed access to the workspace itself, so there was no clean way to lock someone out. If someone changed the semantic model, Rees had to fix it on the back end. And every client needed their own report.

The solution

ACTLAB now shares its Power BI reports through DataTako. Viewers get the full interactive experience, with filters, drill-throughs and navigation between reports, without a Power BI license and without ever touching the workspace.

With row-level security, Rees runs one master report instead of building a separate report for each client. User groups decide who sees what. Each external client gets its own group, and the sales reps on that account are added too, so they see exactly what the client sees.

Instead of building a separate report for every client, I use one master report and let DataTako handle who sees what. It made everything much easier and much quicker.

Rees Nemeth, Senior Accountant & Financial Analyst, ACTLAB

Implementation

Setup took about two weeks. There was some back-and-forth on configuring the security parameters, which was settled in a couple of calls.

For data implementation, it was one of the quickest and most efficient products I've ever used.

Rees Nemeth, Senior Accountant & Financial Analyst, ACTLAB

The result

52 users, internal and external, now work from one secure portal, and ACTLAB avoids about 50 Power BI licenses. One master report replaces a separate report per client.