BI Business Intelligence in Power BI

The brief

A client was running on a stack of Excel exports that no one trusted and no one had time to consolidate. Decisions were being made on yesterday’s gut feel. The brief was to make data the fastest path to an answer instead of the slowest.

What I built

A Power BI implementation that pulled 15+ source systems into a single data model — designed around the relationships needed to cross-analyse the business in ways the team couldn’t before — plus custom DAX measures tracking the KPIs that mattered.

• Relational data model — relationships connecting customer, product, region, time, and channel so cross-cutting questions (“revenue by product by region by quarter”, “margin by customer cohort”) are a click, not a CSV joining exercise. Most of the value here was in the modelling: getting the relationships right so any new question could be answered without rebuilding the data.
• Custom DAX measures tracking the KPIs the business actually cared about — contribution margin, run-rate, cohort revenue, year-on-year growth, and others. The DAX layer is what turned a flat data model into a live KPI dashboard.
• Sales performance dashboards with the drill-downs the team actually used — not the ones the board thought they would.

Outcome

Manual reporting time across the business dropped by ~75%. The team replaced their old Excel ritual with a single dashboard tab, and the relational model means new questions can be answered in seconds rather than days. Sales conversations moved from “let me get back to you with that number” to having the number on screen.