Case Studies Power BI Architecture & Roadmap to Transform Self-Service Reporting

Power BI Architecture & Roadmap to Transform Self-Service Reporting

Overview

Our client, an industrial supplies wholesaler, engaged us for a project to implement Microsoft Power BI to overhaul reporting throughout the company. Goals included clean and centralized data, streamlined reporting processes at both the business-unit and firm-wide level, and less reliance on the IT group to support individual reports.

This project arose because our client was going to sunset a large part of their infrastructure, and as a result, all their reporting being done throughout the company would need to be changed. The client went through an extensive search for the right modern BI reporting tool and the business chose Power BI. They chose this approach not only for the visualization aspect, but because there were proven technologies & techniques that we outlined that would reduce the ongoing problem of employees conducting manual, time-intensive processes to access data and report on data.

Our approach was presented to the client business users and vetted by leadership after comparing it against other modern data tools and vendors. This choice showcases not only the ability for Power BI, as a tool, to meet the needs of the client, but also confirms the approach Concurrency has to effectively implementing self-service reporting throughout an organization.

Solution

To begin outlining the Architecture & Roadmap, the Concurrency project team met with the client’s BI team and other business leaders to understand culture, timeline, organizational structure, and reporting processes throughout the company. We applied these findings to both the technical solution and the Roadmap.  As a result of our expertise in Power BI & organizational change methodologies our roadmap outlines a well-defined direction that is ready to support an influx of staff diving right into Power BI and building out reports, including time to deal with training and support matters.

In conjunction with our Architecture & Roadmap we conducted a production pilot of Power BI which was designed as a companion to an existing 180-page PDF report that was manually generated on a monthly basis. The effort to build this report in the existing Excel format consumed about 30 hours per month. Our efforts with this pilot allowed us to showcase how transforming the current report into a Power BI solution produced an automated report that gave better and deeper insights than the existing solution. This allowed the end consumers to compare the existing static reporting to the new solution, and drive to better insights with it.

Our client was pleased with the automation and time-saving processes that we and the program provided and are excited about next steps.