The five-day report that nobody reads.
Monthly reviews land days after the moment that mattered. Operations runs on hunch. Strategy runs on last quarter.
Critical reports take days to refresh, leadership runs on stale data, and shadow Excel undermines the BI team. Fix it with a Power BI semantic model on Microsoft Fabric Direct Lake · first dashboards live in week three.
If half of these sound familiar, this is your fight.
No formal assessment needed · just an honest look at the daily friction.
Critical reports take days to refresh.
You wait until the close cycle to know what happened mid-month.
Front-line teams build their own Excel views from system exports.
You can't answer cross-domain questions without a custom query.
Power BI dashboards are slow, stale, or out of date.
Half the leadership meeting is spent debating the numbers, not acting on them.
Why it happens
Batch-first architecture
Data lands once a day from ETL · the platform was never designed for sub-hour freshness.
No semantic layer
Every report rebuilds calculations from scratch · which means slow refresh and divergent definitions.
Self-service stalled
Without certified models and DLP, BI teams gatekeep · so business users wait or build shadow Excel.
What it costs you
Stale decisions
Operations runs on hunches because the data is too old. Trust in the platform erodes.
Hidden Excel
Front-line teams build ungoverned monitors · no security, no audit, no consistency.
Strategy drag
Pricing, demand, capacity decisions wait for last month's close · while the market moves on.
The shortest path from problem to results.
Microsoft-first stack. Belgian and Estonian engineering. Senior team kickoff to year four.
Power BI semantic model
A central, version-controlled model with row-level security and calculation groups · the spine of self-service.
See solutionMicrosoft Fabric Direct Lake
Sub-second queries on your largest tables · without the Import + Refresh dance.
See solutionReal-time intelligence
Eventstreams, KQL databases, Activator alerts · for the signals that need sub-minute reaction.
See solutionWhen monthly sales reviews moved from PDF to live dashboards.
55 KPIs across three tiers · refreshed daily
A €600M industrial player with monthly Excel-driven reviews. We built a Microsoft Fabric semantic model with three KPI tiers and a tone-of-voice framework: GOLD numbers move strategy, SILVER moves operations, BRONZE supports specialists. First insights live in week three. Self-service for 40 users in week eight.
Time-to-insight is fixable. Pick your highest-pain KPI.
Free 60-minute KPI tiering call · we'll find the three highest-leverage moves.
Common questions, direct answers.
How long until we see first dashboards?
Three weeks for the first dashboards live with users in the room. We start with one business domain end-to-end, then expand. The "big bang reporting platform" approach almost always fails — we don't do it.
Do we need to migrate everything to Microsoft Fabric first?
No. Fabric Direct Lake on OneLake gives sub-second queries on your largest tables, but you can stay on Synapse, Snowflake or even SQL Server for the first phase. The semantic model is what matters.
What does "tiered KPIs" mean in your approach?
GOLD numbers move strategy (5-7 metrics), SILVER moves operations (10-15), BRONZE supports specialists (30+). It prevents the "55 KPIs all at executive level" trap that kills attention.
Will this work with our existing Power BI investment?
Yes. We refactor existing reports into a single semantic model rather than starting from scratch. Most customers keep 60-80% of their existing reports after migration · with sub-second performance.
How is this different from a generic BI consultancy?
We don't ship reports · we ship a semantic layer with row-level security, calculation groups and certified definitions. The reports become commodity. The model is the asset.