Group Analyst: Business Intelligence (Durban North) at Aspen Pharma Group

JOB PURPOSE:

• Operational role in the Group Digital Technology team. The Group Analyst: Business Intelligence is responsible for enabling high quality, reliable, and actionable insights across Aspen’s group entities by designing, developing, maintaining, and supporting BI solution backends, i.e. the ingestion of data into common data platforms like Microsoft Fabric. Assist with more complex dashboards and analytical models where required from business. The role ensures data accuracy via single source of truth, promotes data driven decision making, improves reporting efficiency, and supports Aspen’s digital and analytics transformation through modern BI tools and best practices. This position plays a critical role in ensuring that Aspen’s executives, operational teams, and global functions have access to trusted data and consistent reporting across regions, manufacturing sites, and business units.

KEY PERFORMANCE AREAS:

BI Fabric Enablement, data ingestion, and maintenance 

• Develop, enhance, and support BI dashboards, reports, and analytical models using Aspen’s approved BI platforms (e.g., Power BI, Microsoft Fabric) for more complex business requests.
• Translate business requirements into technical designs, focusing on what data is needed.
• Build, in collaboration with the data architect, an extraction of data into Microsoft Fabric to be exposed to Business BI teams.
• Ensure all BI artifacts follow standards, performance best practices, and data governance rules.
• Manage versioning, optimization, and lifecycle updates for datasets.

Data Modelling and Preparation

• Build and maintain semantic models, datasets, and data flows to support BI initiatives.
• Work closely with other GDT teams to refine data pipelines, define transformations, and ensure data availability.
• Validate data accuracy, completeness, and logical consistency across dashboards.
• Support the development of star schemas, fact tables, and dimension models aligned to Aspen’s enterprise architecture.

Stakeholder Engagement and Requirements Analysis

• Partner with business stakeholders (Finance, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Commercial, QA, etc.) to gather analytical needs.
• Conduct meetings to clarify data requirements.
• Act as a trusted advisor to business teams on reporting improvements and data-driven decision-making.
• Ensure data moved to common data platforms meet reporting outputs that serve group-wide consistency and standardization.

Operational Support and BAU Activities 

• Investigate and resolve BI-related incidents, data discrepancies, and access issues within agreed SLAs.
• Monitor scheduled refreshes, data pipelines, and dashboard performance.
• Support BI platform administration activities such as workspace governance, access control, and usage monitoring.
• Provide training and guidance to Business super users, enabling broader self-service analytics adoption.
• Identify automation opportunities and efficiencies in reporting and data preparation.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in information systems, Computer Science, Data Analytics, or a related discipline.
• ITIL Foundation or data governance certifications (advantage).
• 5 years hands-on experience in BI development, data extraction or data analytics roles.
• Strong experience with the Microsoft BI platforms – Fabric, PowerBI, etc.
• Experience in manufacturing or pharmaceutical/regulated environments preferred.
• Exposure to enterprise data platforms (Azure Data Lake, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, etc.).
• Familiarity with DAX, M Query, ETL concepts, and data pipelines.