Implementing Microsoft Power BI for a leading Credit Union

The client provides insurance and investment solutions to help credit unions thrive and help the consumers build financial security.

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Challenge

The client’s lending department had been using traditional SSRS reports for daily, monthly, and annual reporting.

Data Collection - AhaApps

AhaApps’ Methodology

Determining how the reports will be built in the future, who will be owning the data, who will have the access to build and share reports.

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AhaApps’ Solution

Report versioning was done in git and the deployment process was setup using Power BI extensions in azure. Power BI embedded environment was set up in azure by following Microsoft’s 5 step process.

Client’s challenge:

The client’s lending department had been using traditional SSRS reports for daily, monthly, and annual reporting. The reports were simple black and white reports and provide no flexibility of playing around with the data to the stakeholder.
Since the company was developing an application for the lending department, with all their data being in the cloud, they wanted to utilize the power of Power BI to transform their reporting and embed the newly built power BI reports in the web application.

The main challenge here was that the lending department was the first one to implement Power BI and they needed someone who could help with the reporting infrastructure development and rewrite the existing reports in Power BI.

Additionally, support and guide the in-house developers in embedding the Power BI reports in the new web application.

AhaApps’ analysis:

Since the department was one of the first ones to implement Power BI, it was no surprise that was a lot of challenges for setting up the infrastructure while adhering to the client’s data security and access guidelines. The primary focus was on using the best practices for setting up the reporting infrastructure to optimize the Power BI performance.

AhaApps’ methodology:

We followed a simplistic approach for implementing Power BI:

  • Acknowledging the guidelines around data security and access.
  • Understanding the data that was being used in the reports.
  • Determining how the reports will be built in the future, who will be owning the data, who will have the access to build and share reports, how the version control will happen, and how are we going to go through the report deployment process.
  • Since the data was in the cloud, we did not have to create and use a Power BI gateway for data refresh.
  • Recognize the report requirements, create mapping documents, and a report template for a pilot review.
  • Identify the structure of the web application and the underlying requirements to embed the report.


Governance:


  • Determine the users with access to data and users with access to build and share reports.
  • Build a self-service BI strategy to successfully transfer data from the data owners to report builders to the final stake holders.

AhaApps’ solution:

  • Communicated with the IT department to understand the security guidelines and access requirements.
  • Worked with business analysts and data owners to understand the underlying data to be used to create the reports.
  • Created the mapping documents for the reports.
  • Created data flows and shared datasets to be used for building the reports.
  • Shared datasets were endorsed and certified for future use.
  • Report templates were built for a pilot review with the stakeholders.
  • Trigger tables were built to implement the refresh schedules for the reports. It helped in streamlining the reporting process.
  • Report versioning was done in git and the deployment process was setup using power bi extensions in azure.
  • Power BI embedded environment was set up in azure by following Microsoft’s 5 step process.
  • A demo report was tested and embedded in the web application.

Tools Used:

  1. Microsoft Azure
  2. Power BI
  3. Microsoft endorsed power BI extensions
  4. SQL server
  5. Git

Time taken:

  1. 6 months

The ‘aha!’ moment

The stakeholders loved the flexibility the reports provided and the ability to drill down to multiple time-related fields for multiple visualizations. They loved the dynamic nature of the report and how a boring black and white SSRS report was turned into something more appealing. The client was impressed with how we were able to achieve our objective and set up a process for Power BI implementation and governance that could be used by other departments in the future to implement the solution.