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July 10, 2023

Jacobs Solutions Inc. builds Alluvial Platform with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Dallas-based organization Jacobs Solutions Inc. (Jacobs) is focused on creating a more integrated and sustainable world with their innovative and advanced engineering solutions ranging from advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, health, and life sciences and more. Comprised of more than 60,000 employees across 50 countries, Jacobs builds solutions in a diversity of fields ranging from national security and space exploration to transit and water.

Jacobs Solutions

Being a solutions company with a global footprint and client base, one of the biggest challenges Jacobs faces is delivering certainty on all their projects and programs. Initially, Jacobs faced an issue - project data was scattered across APIs, data lakes, network storage, and databases. This fragmentation hindered the agile and scalable creation of dashboards and reports. Developers would have to consolidate numerous steps that were tedious and time-consuming. Instead of building everything from the ground up, Jacobs realized that they needed a scalable end-to-end platform to accelerate solutions. Alex Mahrou, Director of Emerging Technology and Platforms function within the People, & Places Solutions Line of Business at Jacobs helped lead this effort.  

Rebuilding with the Right Tools

To achieve their vision, Mahrou and his team knew it would be imperative that they selected the right tools to support the ambitions they had for the platform. Since Jacobs was already an enterprise customer of Microsoft and actively using Azure, it was a natural step for the organization to explore Power BI and the extended Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.  

After diving into Power BI, it was clear that Power BI scales with licensing and infrastructure very well. Plus, Power BI Embedded would be a game changer for Jacobs, enabling them to easily create and provide solutions for their customers that they can then easily integrate into their own ecosystem. Mahrou and the team realized the powerful opportunity to build valuable BI solutions that could also enable self-service. With this vision in mind, the team set out to build Alluvial: Jacobs’ new end-to-end platform. The adoption of Alluvial signifies a fundamental shift in how Jacobs approaches Data and AI. This platform is not just another tool in the technology stack, it's a strategic move that places Data and AI at the core of Jacobs’ operations. Alluvial is not only transforming how Jacobs delivers solutions, but it's also shaping the future of the organization. 

Figure 1 – Alluvial’s Logo

Power BI, while being an integral part of the solution, was just one piece of the puzzle. To complement its capabilities, Jacobs decided to integrate Microsoft Fabric, a unified data and AI SaaS platform that would provide the necessary scalability and power to drive the Alluvial platform. 

Enabling Scalable Self-Service with Alluvial 

Supported by Azure and built on the robust Lakehouse architecture, Alluvial leverages Microsoft Fabric for seamless data management and advanced AI capabilities. Each Alluvial project utilizes its own Azure Data Lake and Fabric modules like OneLake and Synapse Data Engineering for efficient data storage and processing. 

“Our goal was, ‘ok, I can build something cool in Power BI, but how do you take it to the next step of self-service and dissemination to everyone?’ so we built Alluvial as a platform that would allow people to publish their Power BI reports and invite people to view them” explains Mahrou.  

As Alluvial usage began to grow, there was a need for a strong data warehousing tool to leverage advanced analytics with large semi-structured payloads of data. With the inclusion of Microsoft Fabric's OneLake, Jacobs has gained an edge in handling these large semi-structured data payloads. This strategic integration with OneLake in Fabric allows Jacobs to separate their storage data from compute data, optimizing costs and performance. Azure Synapse Analytics, another Fabric module, makes it easy to materialize data that is both on-premises or in the cloud to aid data handoff. To ensure security across the board, Alluvial has implemented multi-tenant enablement to allow for segregation between Azure Active Directory and Power BI tenants. By including this in the foundation, Alluvial will be able to scale securely and ensure data is fully protected by overseeing who has control over what data. 

Now users can publish reports and create workspaces for users in a self-service fashion, all within Alluvial. This level of integration frees up IT overhead and makes it exponentially easier for everyone to get access to and share high-quality data. The platform can also administrate projects, helping manage global admin work or manage things at a workspace or project level. Alluvial also has container apps to help publish open-source applications very easily.  

Building Diverse Client Solutions 

Since Jacobs serves a wide range of clients, they have been able to build a huge array of client solutions. From financial analytics to performance metrics to real-time IoT (Internet of Things) data, Jacobs has leveraged Alluvial to support a diverse range of both internal and external solutions. The power of Alluvial, combined with Microsoft Fabric, is showcased in the broad spectrum of client solutions Jacobs has been able to deliver.  

Alluvial, as a strategic Data & AI platform, is powering the innovative solutions that Jacobs offers to its diverse client base. It's the backbone of data-driven culture, enabling Jacobs to leverage the power of advanced analytics and AI in unique ways to deliver highly specialized solutions. 

Within Jacobs, the Financial Planning and Accounting team (FP&A) built a competitive analysis dashboard of blended market data and insights from Jacobs and their peers. Users can comment on data and provide collective intelligence, helping analysts and other relevant stakeholders make stronger predictions and focus less on finding the metrics and more on data-driven decision-making.

Alluvial also supports massive infrastructure projects around the world, managing and delivering controls and insights that boost confidence in delivery. A new Alluvial feature called SIFT (Software for Intelligent Filtering and Transformation) brings design data into a Power BI data model and curates an immersive 3D view with Power BI controls to get a visual rendering of their exact vision.

Alluvial SIFT demo illustration
Figure 2 – An example of immersive 3D view in Power BI found in SIFT

A large chemical company working with Jacobs leverages Alluvial to measure the performance of remediation and monitors select analytics at a plethora of sites to ensure environmental compliance. Access to these metrics helps keep the client on track and ensure they are outputting high-quality work while remaining strict and compliant.  

Clients have even leveraged Alluvial to build out reports tracking IoT data. Water utility services use high-frequency sensors to keep track of water quality. With Alluvial, users can ensure quality with near real-time analytics that save time in both generating reports and chasing down data.  

Because Alluvial prioritizes self-service, it was easy to build a diverse range of client solutions and make sure performance and data quality are consistent and up to Jacobs’ standards. Alluvial promotes a data-driven culture within Jacobs and Jacobs’ client projects. 

The success and adoption of Alluvial across Jacobs marks a significant milestone in their journey toward becoming a data and AI-driven organization. This platform has become integral to operations, enabling the delivery of more efficient, more effective solutions. With Alluvial and its foundations in Microsoft Fabric, the platform is strategically poised to redefine the Architectural Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, leveraging data and AI to drive innovation and growth. 

Driving Adoption and Taking Alluvial to the Next Level 

Since deciding to utilize Azure for Alluvial, Jacobs has seen faster time-to-insights on numerous fronts. By standardizing on one platform, the organization can now onboard users faster and ensure a prominent level of data quality across the board. Adoption of Alluvial has grown tremendously with the help of internal communities and a newly launched Data & Cyber Academy to encourage growth and learning. The team hopes that adoption will continue to grow as more features are released and Alluvial is expanded to new markets and regions.  

Mahrou has seen an enormous difference in the way Alluvial has shaped the data culture at Jacobs and the improvement these solutions have brought to clients. “We are building a data-driven culture around the world-class problems that Jacobs undertakes for our clients. It is hard to spot it when you zoom in, but when you zoom out and you are looking at all these projects [in Alluvial], you are like, ok, I believe I am making a difference here. It is exciting.” 

Moving forward, Jacobs hopes to make it even easier to deploy to Alluvial by listing on Azure Marketplace. With the addition of self-serve connectors and visuals, Jacobs can reduce friction and deliver value quicker than ever before. From a technical standpoint, Jacobs is also working to streamline insights around data-heavy construction and design workflows via 3D visualization and exploring the possibilities of natural language processing via generative AI (artificial intelligence) to take reporting to the next level. In recognition of Alluvial’s adoption, the Alluvial team at Jacobs has been nominated to sit on a customer advisory board for Fabric, to help drive Embedded ISV use cases and value for Multi-tenant Fabric implementations. Their expertise and experience will play a crucial role in shaping the future development of Fabric from an ISV standpoint. 

“We are building a data-driven culture around the world-class problems that Jacobs undertakes for our clients. It is hard to spot it when you zoom in, but when you zoom out and you are looking at all these projects [in Alluvial], you are like, ok, I believe I am making a difference here. It is exciting.”

Alex Mahrou, Director of Emerging Technology and Platforms, Jacobs Solutions Inc.

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