Financial Reports using Power BI for a Building Materials Company

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Client: Building Materials Company

Technology Solution: Power BI, Power Query

Data Sources: ERP (Dynamics 365 Business Central), Excel Spreadsheets

Industry: Building Materials

Our client is a leading manufacturer of access products throughout North America. They manufacture standard, odd size as well as custom in a very short time.

The challenge

The client is using Business Central as an ERP platform while using Excel spreadsheets to store the data for sales targets.

The data in spreadsheets had many errors and missing values.

Also, there were a lot of reports to be created based on the customers and geographic sales data within a very short period.

The client also wanted fast performance of the reports, which was a challenge considering the large data size and calculation complexity.

 

Solution Delivered

  • We first performed ETL to clean the data from Business Central and Excel.
  • We also implemented automated data quality validation as per various business rules.
  • Dynamic calculations were used to incorporate future changes - In the future when we get new scenarios in the data, the calculations will work fine without requiring any changes in the code.
  • Improved Power BI report performance by optimizing the calculations.

Architecture Diagram

Result

  • The static interactivity of the report was replaced by dynamic interactivity. We removed the manual refresh and changes to the static reports by enabling the automated refresh and making the existing calculations dynamic.
  • The query performance of the report was enhanced. Visuals loading time reduced from 30 min to 25 sec.
  • Made the report user-friendly by keeping the functionality and accessibility of the report very simple.
  • Customer segmentation analysis was added to the report, using revenue, gross profit, and gross margin bridge.

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