SAP to Self-Serve Power BI, With Reporting 50× Faster Than MS SQL

The situation

Reports were slow, manual and hard to trust.

The manufacturer ran reporting and decisions on traditional BI: spreadsheets and manual data collection. With large volumes of data, the process was time-consuming and prone to human error, and the reports it produced were rarely effective enough to base decisions on. Teams could not explore their own data easily, so analytics stayed shallow across a large manufacturing operation. The reporting itself ran on an MS SQL-based approach, the baseline the new platform is measured against.

What we built

SAP ECC to self-serve Power BI, with no manual step.

We built a data platform on Microsoft Azure. Azure Data Factory automates the integration of sales and finance data from SAP ECC, and a Databricks Lakehouse unifies it into a single governed model of around 3 TB of warehoused data, so no manual step sits between SAP and reporting. On that model, Power BI delivers self-serve dashboards that track KPIs across sales, accounts and finance. The platform runs on Azure Data Lake with enterprise-grade security.

How it works

The architecture, stage by stage.

1. Source

   • SAP ECC · sales and finance data

2. Azure Data Factory

   • Automated ingestion

3. Databricks Lakehouse

   • Single governed model · around 3 TB

4. Power BI

   • Self-serve dashboards · KPIs across sales, accounts and finance

What changed

The outcomes, as the client measures them.

• Reporting ran 50 times faster than the previous MS SQL-based approach.
• SAP-to-Power BI integration is fully automated, with no manual steps.
• Self-serve BI gave sales, accounts and finance teams direct access to trusted KPIs.
• Removing manual effort freed the team to focus on development rather than maintenance.
• Business optimization delivered a reported 25 percent ROI.