Microsoft's Power BI has come a long way over the last year. Microsoft is continually making improvements to the product, releasing new enhancements on a monthly basis. Power BI is a great tool that helps make sense of your data. It allows you to build reports and or dashboards that can be consumed in your organization to make better decisions, allowing you to see trends in data. Organizations can use Power BI desktop for self-service BI or publish reports and dashboards to the Power BI service (cloud) and share contents between users in an organization.
Power BI allows you to connect to multiple data sources. They can be on premise data sources or data sources in the cloud. An example could be connecting on premise GP database (SQL) and data from Dynamics 365 and or data in an Excel file.
One of the potential issues with connecting to on premise SQL is that you would need to deploy the Power BI Gateway and have it refresh the data model up to 8 times per day, which doesn't allow for real-time data. The best way to work with this limitation with GP data is to deploy Odata service for GP and connect it to Power BI
The main steps to get this working are:
- Setup Odata Service and expose the service externally
- Configure the Odata service in GP
- Connect GP Odata to Power BI
- Add Power BIon your GP Home Screen
Microsoft has made it easy to get started. You can for Dynamics GP 2018. The content pack has reports built for the financial, Sales, Purchasing and inventory modules. The reports are a good starting point and allow you to modify them to make suite your organization.
Once you have built your reports and added them to dashboards, you can view these in the Power BI service or to make it easier for users, add these objects on their Dynamics GP home screen's in GP 2018.
We have only scratched the surface of what you can do with Power BI. Shawn Dorward, Microsoft MVP has a very good blog series on setting this all up.
If you would like assistance with Power BI, contact theat Prophet Business Group.
Thanks for sharing this - I am really looking forward to seeing some more advanced project management tools like this one. They are making our lives so much easier.