Power BI Adoption to Support Data-Driven Culture Development

About Our Client

The Client is one of Qatar’s leading automotive companies. It has been on the market for over 50 years and develops in line with the Qatar National Vision 2030. The company has earned the reputation of a reliable business partner thanks to its transparency-focused business values.

Need to Replace a Legacy Reporting Solution with a User-Friendly Alternative

One of the Client’s current goals is to develop an enterprise-wide data-driven culture. In line with this goal, the company wanted to improve its reporting processes, which were based on the built-in capabilities of SAP Business Warehouse (BW). The reports represented data in plain columns without any visuals and had limited capabilities for data exploration, such as filtering, slicing, and dicing. It was difficult and time-consuming for business users to interpret insights, notice patterns, and find required information. The Client decided to adopt Microsoft Power BI as a user-friendly alternative. With 19 years of experience in business intelligence and a proven track record of cooperation with GCC countries, ScienceSoft became the tech partner in the company’s BI initiative.

Integrating Power BI With the Client’s Data Warehouse

Our team conducted several interviews with the Client’s stakeholders and examined the existing SAP reports to create a detailed list of enhancement requirements for each report, for example, what visuals and filters are to be implemented. The Client’s IT team provided ScienceSoft access to the data warehouse (DWH) and the SQL queries the company used for reporting. Our Power BI experts analyzed the DWH structure and the SQL queries and concluded that they would fit the logic of the future Power BI reports. Our developers reused most of the queries to save development time and costs and customized some of the queries (e.g., implemented aggregations or conditional logic).

Considering this, ScienceSoft implemented the following report-creation workflow: connected to SAP Business Warehouse via the native API, Microsoft Power BI Desktop queries the DWH with the original SQL requests or the ones customized by ScienceSoft and generates scheduled reports. Users can also build ad hoc reports (e.g., for the required periods, vehicle models, employee groups). The data is updated daily to ensure the provided insights are up-to-date.

Building 25 Interactive Reports and 7 C-Level Dashboards

The Client received 25 Power BI reports that cover multiple business areas, including finance management, human resources, customer relationship management, service delivery, and vehicles and spare parts distribution. The new reports offer capabilities for data filtering and dicing, for example, net revenue can be filtered by customer and customer segment, and parts stock can be segmented by brand, material, and aging status. Almost all the reports feature charts and diagrams for filter-specific data views, with some reports offering up to 10 different visuals. Thanks to in-memory data processing, cashing mechanisms, and the efficient query engine, the new solution reflects filtering results up to 90x faster than the previous one.

ScienceSoft also built seven BI dashboards for the company’s CEO, CFO, and COO. The dashboards provide a 360-degree view of the company’s financial performance, operational efficiency, and human resource management over the last five years. With drill-down capabilities, the company’s C-levels can easily switch from a general overview of the company’s business operations to a detailed view of KPIs by business direction, vehicle type, employee demographics, and more.

The UI of the delivered reports and dashboards reflects the company’s brand book style, including the colors and the logo.

To ensure data security, our team implemented role-based access control.

Power BI as a Solid Foundation for Data-Driven Culture Development

With ScienceSoft’s assistance, the Client replaced its legacy SAP-based solution with Power BI, achieved 90x faster reflection of filtering results, and received 25 reports and 7 C-suite dashboards with rich self-service capabilities and easy-to-interpret visuals. The new data exploration and analysis capabilities make up a solid foundation for enterprise-wide adoption of data-driven decision-making.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Power BI, SAP Business Warehouse.