OPAP empowers its partners’ agencies with Power BI Embedded

Founded in 1958, OPAP is the leading gaming company in Greece and one of the most renowned worldwide. As part of its vision, OPAP aspires to offer best-in-class entertainment, with customer-centricity and digitalization being key areas of focus.

In this framework, OPAP made sure its partners’ agencies have the necessary support to make data-driven business decisions, by implementing Power BI Embedded. Microsoft’s solution allows OPAP agents to see key information about their activities, such as targets, status reports, etc. It also helps them focus on improving their operations and pursuing growth.

OPAP operates and manages numerical lotteries, sports betting games, horseracing mutual betting, lotteries, instant win games and video lottery terminals (VLTs). The OPAP stores’ network is the largest retail network in Greece, with about 4,000 points of sale across the country. All agencies rely on information from OPAP headquarters to ensure operational excellence and promote growth.

“We have been offering internal reporting to our agents since 2008 through our dedicated partner portals,” says Stratis Valavanis, Corporate Delivery Director at OPAP. “To make sure our partners had all the business information they needed, we had to involve two technical teams—one to prepare the data and one to produce presentations. This was time and resource consuming and not agile.”

As OPAP’s products and services have been diversified over time and content shared with partners became more dynamic, the company needed more versatile reporting mechanisms. After analyzing all the alternatives, OPAP chose Microsoft Power BI Embedded.

Easy reporting for everyday use

The benefits from using the new digital solution were significant for the company and its partners. “With Power BI Embedded, we’ve enabled interactive reporting and automatic data renewal. This way, we facilitate our partners to take business decisions. Changes can also be made without overloading IT with requests,” says Valavanis.

The new solution provides highly secure access to each partner, delivering them personalized data relevant to their businesses. “With Power BI Embedded being a visual tool, our partners—even if they’re not tech-savvy—need to spend only a few minutes on the reports in order to get insights, and then they’re able to focus on their customers,” explains Valavanis.

“With Power BI Embedded being a visual tool, our partners—even if they’re not tech-savvy—need to spend only a few minutes on the reports in order to get insights, and then they’re able to focus on their customers.”

Stratis Valavanis, Corporate Delivery Director, OPAP

OPAP’s IT team is also able to customize reports based on the level of detail needed and share them with other teams internally. “We’re able to extend the tool’s usability to our call center at no extra cost,” reveals Leonidas Giannoulis, Business Intelligence Team Leader at OPAP.

“We’re able to extend the tool’s usability to our call center at no extra cost.”

Leonidas Giannoulis, Business Intelligence Team Leader, OPAP

The company plans to further expand the use of Microsoft’s solution: “We are considering expanding the usage of Power BI Embedded to other business areas as well. It’s flexible, provides us with real-time metrics, and enables teams to design their own reports without a steep learning curve. So, it just makes sense to do that,” concludes Valavanis.