Accelerate decision-making with Power BI

Project Overview

An international manufacturing organisation was looking to engage a Microsoft Partner to automate and scale their Business Intelligence platform.

The company supplies high-value capital equipment to heavy industry. Managing credit control and understanding sales activity trends in parts and support services is critical in a disrupted global supply chain environment.

The existing reporting process relied heavily on the manual export of data from finance, credit control, and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) source systems, and the data was consolidated using Excel spreadsheets. The process was cumbersome, untimely, and prone to error due to extensive manual manipulation, and the report lacked drill-down capability. As a result, confidence in the accuracy of the reports was low.

The client wanted a centralised, automated reporting solution that would pull together disparate data sources and provide self-service BI capabilities.

Project Objectives

The organisation set out to achieve the following:

• Automate data integration from multiple business systems into a single source of truth for reporting that would serve the sales and credit management departments.
• Accelerate the speed of decision-making by providing leadership and management roles with access to accurate, reliable, and secure reports with drill-down capabilities and visualisations interactivity to inform their decisions.
• An enterprise-scale analytics solution designed with the flexibility to manage new user access, user security, and scalable in line with the organisation’s growth plans.
• A reporting tool that delivers reliable and accurate insights to management anytime, anywhere. Increased trust in the data coupled with enhanced data modelling to provide flexible options for reporting and facilitate confident decision-making.

Solution

Professional Advantage (PA) was the partner of choice to deliver this project. Our team of Power BI consultants worked closely with project stakeholders to:

• Automate the data extraction and ingestion process from the source systems.
• Utilise Power Query to automate the data preparation and transformation.
• Advance decision-making capabilities by creating a data model that enhanced their reporting capabilities. The new Power BI model incorporated drill-down, cross-dimensional filtering, and interactive visualisation beyond the original filters by department. Interactive reporting features in the new Power BI model included drill-down by customer industry segments, work teams, individual staff, customer groups, product categories, and service items.
• Make data insights accessible and enable users to collaborate via various Microsoft technology, including Power BI Service, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft SharePoint sites.
• Optimise data security and governance with Power BI’s row-level security, managed roles, sensitivity labels, and Microsoft Office 365 security groups.

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