Analyze Data with Microsoft Power BI
Visualize your data from a variety of sources and gain new insights. With Power BI for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Data with Little Informative Value Are
Your Challenge without Power BI
Do you have an overview of the performance of all branches? Can you evaluate the reasons for complaints from your customers? Can you visualize key sales figures that are critical to success, broken down by region and time period? No? Then let us change that. Your data is probably currently scattered across various sources and you lack an overview. This makes it difficult and extremely time-consuming to make well-founded decisions.
Visualize Data from Multiple Sources:
Through the Solution: Power BI
How does Power BI work? Microsoft Power BI is an interactive business intelligence tool for data visualization. With Power BI visualizations, you can keep an eye on all important developments in your company at all times. You can easily create clear live dashboards and reports based on a variety of data sources and monitor your company easily – Even from your smartphone. This allows you to resolve the inefficiency of isolated data sets and take targeted measures more quickly.
It’s easy to use: If you are looking for specific data, you can ask a question in natural language in Microsoft Power BI and the BI system will suggest visualizations. You can also use your existing data, forecasts and trends. What more could you want?
Why Power BI for Dynamics 365 Business Central?
These Are Your Benefits
Visualization
Create comprehensive tables, interactive diagrams and easily integrate map services. You can also share these with your team.
Many Data Sources
You can link data from a wide variety of tables (e.g., stock value and item price). You are not limited to one application.
Basis for Action
You can keep an eye on developments and recognize immediately when action is required. This makes it easier for you to make decisions and convince third parties.
Power BI Examples:
Examples from Practice for Power BI for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Power BI can be used for a wide variety of scenarios. We have put together some Power BI visualizations for you. Can you find your situation in an example?
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Requirement of the customer: There should be a general exchange of data from Business Central with Power BI in order to create meaningful reports (e. g. development of market share, sales, sentiment, competition by region and time period).
Solution: To enable smooth data exchange between Business Central and Power BI, you can either access the web services in Business Central or develop an API that can be used to build the reports.
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Requirement of the customer: There should be an evaluation of sales by zip code and branch.
Solution: Creation of a Power BI report that visualizes the address data from the sales in a map via an integrated visual.
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Requirement of the customer: There should be a report that shows how many new hires there are compared to the previous year, by gender, by age or by percentage development.
Solution: A development was made in Business Central that makes it possible to record personnel data and track the development of this data using Power BI.
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Requirement of the customer: There should be a map of Germany with information on target and actual sales figures.
Solution: The sales and vendor data is retrieved from Business Central and a relation is created to visualize the data in the dashboard.
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Requirement of the customer: In the future, materials that are prone to errors should be filtered out.
Solution: A sales complaint including the reasons for the complaint are available in Business Central as standard and can be called up. The greens can then be listed and sorted by frequency in the Power BI report.
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Requirement of the customer: The vacation days of all employees should be listed in a chart to provide a better overview of which employees are on vacation and when.
Solution: Creation of a Power BI report that loads the vacation management from Business Central in a report and displays the approved and requested vacation days in a matrix. The report is always updated on a daily basis and includes the option to filter by year and month.
Vacation overview in Power BI -
Requirement of the customer: Support is needed to set up the planning parameters in Business Central more precisely.
Solution: Creation of a report that determines the consumption quantity of items per month based on historical values from Business Central and displays key figures such as procurement time, stock level, range, order point and safety stock.
Overview of consumption by month in Power BI -
Requirement of the customer: Outgoing goods are to be evaluated to increase customer satisfaction.
Solution: Creation of a report that shows the number of deliveries (daily performance), partial deliveries, missing items and the average delivery time.
Report on outgoing goods in Power BI
An Insight into the Tool:
Power BI Can Do all of This
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More InformationOur Customers are Convinced by Power BI:
Take a Look at Our References to See for Yourself
Improved Service through Business Central
75% Acceleration in Invoicing
Competitive in the Construction Industry
Still Have Questions about Power BI for Business Central?
We Provide You with Answers in the FAQ
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With Microsoft Power BI, you can visualize your data in a variety of display options (e.g., dashboard of company development, target and actual sales figures). Consolidate data from different data sources and reduce manual activities. The consolidation of data from a wide range of different sources resolves the inefficiency of isolated databases in particular.
In addition, you can recognize the need for action more quickly and take more targeted action by sharing it with your team, other departments or management.
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Power BI Desktop is a free application that you can install on your local computer. This allows you to connect to your data via various data sources on your desktop, combine them in a data model and visualize them (summarized: modeling). You can update your visualizations at the touch of a button (not automatically). Please note that sharing with colleagues is not possible with Power BI Desktop.
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The price of Power BI depends on the chosen features and subscription duration. You have the option to choose between Power BI Desktop (free), Power BI Pro (starting from € 8.40 per user per month), and Power BI Premium (starting from € 16.90 per user per month).
You can find a price and feature overview on our Prices page.
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Yes, Power BI Desktop is a free application.
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Power BI is not included in Office 365 as a standard. Only Power BI Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5. You can find an overview of licensing options on our Prices page.
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Self-Service BI is easily achievable with pre-built standard tables. These provide a rough overview of typical metrics (e.g., revenue, costs, customers). If the company also has IT personnel, additional requirements beyond these standard tables can usually be managed in-house. This is a matter of effort and IT competence. In our opinion, the difficulty lies in data extraction from the system. Often, the requirements on the company side are very complex. It is important to write the right system queries and know where in the system data can be obtained. However, visualization or visual customization is simple and user-friendly. So, if the company has the necessary data, visualization is feasible. The self-service BI approach is therefore not an empty marketing promise and is limited possible.
However, if a company wants to present specific case studies beyond these standard tables, they often consult Microsoft partner companies. Examples include: production analyses, proportion of faulty products, analyses by clients (e.g., branches), procurement analysis, sales by region, overview of personnel figures, and sales dashboards.
We advise you to weigh effort and benefit and to seek out a competent and experienced Microsoft partner company for your first complex Power BI project. This will help you achieve your goal of desired data visualization and also learn how to use Microsoft Power BI yourself.
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Yes, you can. To be able to use Power BI with the local Microsoft Dynamics NAV environment, the OData service must first be activated for the web service. The OData feed is used to provide the data basis from the SQL server. Which data is available can be checked under “Web services” in the client. The OData feed URL that Power BI requires to query the data can also be found there. Only the “Query” object type is initially relevant for Power BI. Many queries are already available as standard, such as a list of all sales orders by sales person. However, you can also create your own queries in the development environment with just a few clicks. These newly created queries must then be created in the web services before you can get started.
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In our workshop, you will learn how to generate added value from your data using Power BI. The workshop is aimed at medium-sized companies that are not yet familiar with the user interface of Dynamics 365 Business Central and want to delve deeper. Initially, we introduce you to the tool. In this part, we answer the following questions among other things:
- What is Power BI?
- What can Microsoft Power BI Desktop and Microsoft Power BI Online do?
- Where/how can I use the applications effectively?
- How do I integrate Power BI into Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics NAV?
Subsequently, we will jointly examine your use case and build an initial evaluation (workshop).
We reserve the right to qualify your request by finding out during a brief phone call whether we can help you. After qualification, we will first have a conversation with you about your requirements so that we can tailor the introductory workshop to your needs and expectations.
You can find the price on our Prices page.
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Using classic dashboards and targeted analyses, you can uncover causes, identify correlations, understand changes, and identify trends. Through our cooperation with our partner navida, we offer ready-made Power BI templates. Fully integrated into Dynamics 365 Business Central/Dynamics NAV. Together, we offer you three packages or tools for Dynamics 365 Business Central: Finance, Sales, Purchasing.
If you are interested, please feel free to contact us.
Part of the Microsoft Power Platform:
Microsoft Power BI for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Microsoft Power BI is one of the components of the Microsoft Power platform alongside Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Pages. The BI system visualizes data from a variety of sources.
What Are You Waiting For?
Get to know us! In a free initial consultation, we’ll determine together if we, as a partner company, and the ERP system for medium-sized businesses, are the right solution for you and your company.
Let's Craft Your Success Story together
We are looking forward to your inquiry!
