Building Reporting That Actually Gets Used

Situation

The ownership group’s monthly performance update was being assembled by hand from multiple sources, took days every cycle, and was always slightly wrong by the time it landed. Different stakeholders were pulling different versions of the same metrics, depending on who built which spreadsheet. The result: leadership had no reliable, current view of how the business was actually performing, and most of the group’s analytical effort was going into building the report rather than making decisions from it.

Approach

We built the reporting layer on Power BI with Microsoft Fabric as the underlying warehouse — a deliberate choice because the operating environment ran heavily on Microsoft, and keeping the reporting stack inside the same suite meant reports could embed natively into SharePoint, PowerPoint, and email distribution, with all of it refreshing automatically. Source data was loaded into Fabric on a scheduled cadence; data cleaning, transformation, and KPI calculation happened in pipeline notebooks; the final report layer was built in Power BI with role-based views for ownership, leadership, and operators. The stack was also designed for compliance-sensitive environments where the underlying data has access restrictions — the reporting layer respects those restrictions without making the user experience painful. We have similar production experience on Tableau, Looker, and Hex; Power BI was the right call here because of the Microsoft alignment.