Success story: How Power BI Revolutionized Data Utilization Across All Departments

Power BI Solution delivers key insights across the product lifecycle. This is a successful story, showing how Power BI revolutionized data utilization across all departments.

Initial challenge: Gather data from multiple sources to visualize production plans to different departments

Solution: Tailored Microsoft Power BI tool connected to data sources from across the company.

ResultProduction Is more efficient. BI solution has been expanded to include purchasing, inventory, quality assurance, and more.

Visualizing production

When the Planner at an international pharmaceutical company wanted to visualize the production plan at the company's manufacturing plant, they did not envisage how integrated the solution would become in the product lifecycle or the cost-savings it would deliver. 

"Our initial challenge was to help the company better understand production schedules and material requirements on the different production lines," says Lydia Söderlund, Senior Consultant Supply Chain & Production. "To do that, we needed access to various data in the ERP and planning systems, among others. The best and fastest way to do this was with Microsoft Power BI."

Providing overviews and specific product details

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool for gathering, filtering, and visualizing complex data from multiple sources. The tool has intuitive design templates for processes such as production lines and delivery schedules. In the tailored solution, production staff can click on specific products to view order details stored in the ERP system.

"When we built the initial solution, it quickly became apparent that it would offer more benefits than we had originally anticipated. The different teams could easily see the production schedule and improve planning, but maintenance teams also started using it to schedule services during production downtime." 

Beyond the production line

Based on the success of the solution, additional processes have been added to provide a more integrated perspective of the product lifecycle. Visualizations of the raw materials and other stock levels have been developed, including product expiry dates. This supports the purchase planning process with and ensures production teams use materials before their expiry dates run out, minimizing wastage. A visualization of physical storage units helps ensure products are always stored in the optimal conditions. Waste emissions have also been visualized, showing current and expected environmental impacts - data that can be used for sustainability reporting and compliance.

Delivering added value through key insights

"Since initial implementation, we have continued to add processes to the system. The insights delivered have improved planning and led to significant cost savings. Today, Microsoft Power BI is used for everything from deviation management reporting to planning production line staffing requirements. And it has all been achieved with existing data in the company's systems. We've simply consolidated and integrated it into one platform that enables better, more informed decision-making."          

Read more about Power BI in the article: Unleash the full potential of your data by bridging information gaps with Microsoft Power Platform | Plantvision