Although I am not a member of Global Logistics, I was aware there must be an efficient way and effective way to deliver key results in each warehouse.

The team sent us a powerpoint file via email weekly to show figures each region and warehouse. I discussed with Global Logistics, and developed and deployed a new way of delivering data with a Power BI report.

Data Source

Some figures are retrieved from SAP Business Warehouse with Power BI Dataflow which I built especially for this purpose. Also, some data are based on few spreadsheets. In order to fill a gap in terms of building relationships, some SharePoint Lists are utilized.

Data modeling

Since we have 3 key figures, this dataset contains 3 fact tables.

Spreadsheets data are cleaned and modeled properly and ensure to add some exception error handlings.

Visualization

A report is built on Power BI Desktop and is deployed Power BI Service.

For better user experience, we need to deliver 3 topics in one window rather than separating each into a page

In order to achieve “dashboard-like” feel, we decided to customize the canvas size to vertically long, which is 1920px X 3000px so that everything can fit into one windows even though scrolling a page is necessary.

Since this is “Global” report, I added bookmarks for each region and assigned them to buttons so mainly controllers and warehouse superusers are easily able to consume the report.

Key takeaways

NA on contents itself as it is confidential.

Few key points to share in terms of building a report.

• Bookmark navigation is effective to show desired filtered state.
• Field parameter on date hierarchy is better rather than having them in matrix in some cases.
• Showing filtered states give consumers which data they are browsing currently.
• Visualizing a data hierarchy in field parameters is useful when I want to tell report consumers what level of granularity is available.

Summary

Based on a recent report insight, which is automatically created by the host, around 100 report consumers are utilizing the report. This is ranked 134 out of 3916 reports in the organization.

With this report, I reduced 5 hours of workload of people who created a powerpoint file, and gave opportunities people in warehouse globally ease of access to key figures.

Typical opening time is 5 seconds.