As soon as the existing Office 365 environment was extended by Power BI services, I applied for a PRO (developer) license. The existing reporting on Customer Service KPIs through Excel tables and pivot reports have been reaching the limits in regards of table sizes and the time per week spend on data retrieving and modeling.

The first Power BI reports have been very straightforward replacements from Excel while using all the benefits of Power Query. Within the following months the number of reports increased dramatically and the actual benefits of Power BI could be leveraged.

Here some highlights on the vast variety of sources I was able to integrate into Power BI datasets:

• Excel tables and TXT files stored on shared drives
• Documents attached from Outlook inboxes
• Email messages from Outlook inboxes
• Documents stored and worked-on in MS Teams
• Daily TXT files from SAP and other application (e.g. CISCO contact center) stored on shared drives
• Website content from Atlassian wiki-spaces

My experiences and creativity on data modeling helped a lot that the data structure was meeting integration needs.

The integration of data sources through Power Query became recently replaced by the new ‘Data Flow’ functionality. Scheduled refreshing was used so manual updates became obsolete.

In the beginning reports have been shared from one workspace through access on user level. A concept of multiple workspaces allowing segregated data sets from visualizations/reports. This allowed a very efficient way of sharing reports through Power BI Apps by groups of report consumers.

Throughout the entire journey I got inspired by various sources like Microsoft´s user community and multiple channels on YouTube.

Here some highlights of reports/visualizations established:

• ‘Order History’ reports to show trends, efforts, deviations
• ‘Available Inventory’ report calculating the actual available inventory of SKUs considering all planned/allocated inventories
• ‘Promotional Inventory’ report calculating inventory for promotions. Support of sharing price lists for promotions based on workflow results and master data
• ‘Incoming Calls’ report calculating KPIs like lost call rate and incoming call volumes
• ‘Open Order’ report to highlight overall values as well as delays in comparison to earlier snapshots including references to supply issues
• ‘Price List’ report to produce price lists including master data from various sources

Consumer for the repots established have been customer service teams, marketing and sales organizations across Europe.