Power BI drives a reporting transformation at a global industrial group

From SAP R/3 to S/4 HANA: toward a new reporting landscape

A global industrial group with European headquarters in Belgium operates multiple production and distribution sites across the region. Its business revolves around climatization, providing advanced technical systems that help customers manage indoor environments efficiently. 

The client needed to establish new reporting systems, as their reporting and analytics environment built on SAP BusinessObjects (SAP BO) was still operating on SAP R/3. The Datawarehouse also had to be migrated from SAP BW to Azure, and reporting had to be moved from SAP BO to PowerBI.

The shift presented an ideal moment to critically review reporting choices made in the past and to design solutions that would be both scalable and future-proof. The objective was not only to replace SAP BO, but to reassess past reporting choices, standardize KPIs across affiliates, and build a future-proof reporting model that would support both group-level and local decision-making.

TriFinance played a key role on the business side of the project, working closely with the internal project team and IT on the data modeling and dashboarding, while providing guidance to ensure that business needs were addressed.

Modernizing financial reporting with Power BI after an ERP upgrade

Recently, the company took a decisive step forward by upgrading its ERP system from SAP R/3 to SAP S/4 HANA. This change was not just a technical migration but a strategic shift: from cost-based to account-based reporting, and from fragmented datasets to one version of the truth.

This presented an ideal opportunity to critically review the reporting choices made in the past, reassess needs and future-proof their reporting solutions. PowerBI was identified as the optimal tool for the new reporting system.

From fragmented data to one source of truth

In the previous SAP R/3 environment, financial, controlling and sales data were stored in separate tables, leading to frequent discrepancies between controlling and accounting data. Financial reporting relied on the FI cube, while management reporting depended on their old cost-based cube COPA. With S/4 HANA, these data structures fundamentally changed. With the shift to S/4 HANA, the traditional cubes were consolidated by the universal ACDOCA table, consolidating financial and sales data into a single integrated source. This resolved the long-standing discrepancies between accounting (FI) and controlling (CO).

The shift to S/4 HANA required an entirely new approach to the data models used and became the driver to fully transform the reporting landscape. The old reporting tool, SAP BO, which relied on the cost-based cube, had become slow, rigid, and outdated. 

To build a future-proof solution, the company migrated Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics as its new data warehouse and Power BI as its enterprise-wide reporting tool.

Power BI implementation challenges

The transition from SAP to Microsoft technologies allowed to create a completely new data model. Instead of SAP BW and BO, the company is now using Azure and PowerBI for the data and analytics needs.

The transition from SAP to Microsoft created unique challenges:

• Gathering business requirements across a highly diverse stakeholder landscape, from European HQ to multiple affiliates across Europe
• Centralizing reporting to ensure consistency while giving affiliates the flexibility they needed for day-to-day operations.
• Reconciling old reporting (SAP BO) with new S/4 HANA and Power BI definitions.
• Managing change at scale, bringing 1000+ users onboard in a short timeframe.
• Ensuring scalable performance, with reports used by 1000+ users and frequent peaks of 50–100 concurrent sessions.

These challenges made it essential to carefully balance technical accuracy, business relevance, and user adoption.

How to build new reporting from scratch?

“We faced two major challenges that are often hard to align. The first challenge was gathering all business requirements, while the second was implementing this new reporting in a centralized manner,” says Anke Paelman.

To gather business requirements, workshops were organized with different stakeholders, including local affiliates across Europe and HQ. The objective was to understand how they analyze their data and what insights were most critical for their operations.

This process uncovered the need for cross-functional reporting, bringing together future pipeline, sales, and snapshot data for a holistic view. TriFinance, together with the internal team, end users, and IT, translated these requirements into a reporting flow that provided both detailed insights and overall business perspective.

Cross-functional reporting

Gradually new data sources were brought into the reporting scope. As the data model expanded, we needed to make smart decisions on how to distribute the information across different reporting models.

Designing multiple data models in Power BI

One of the biggest shifts was moving from SAP BW/BO to Power BI datasets built on Azure. Rather than one monolithic model, TriFinance designed several Power BI models:

“We started to build multiple data models in PowerBI, all focusing on different areas,” explains Fleur Snauwaert. “For example, a customer dataset focusing on all customer-related data. A more high-level dataset containing more aggregated data from all different reporting scopes (Pipeline, Sales, Snapshot data, …)”

To keep everything consistent, the team relies on shared dimensions that are stored centrally in the data warehouse. These shared dimensions are used across all Power BI datasets, so definitions and hierarchies stay the same everywhere. This makes it easy for users to move between high-level and detailed reports without confusion.

Centralization

The second challenge was centralization: how to maintain only a limited set of reports without losing the flexibility needed by the business.

“We achieved this by giving the end-user a lot of flexibility in how they use the reports,” says Anke Paelman. “End users are given input options to partially decide what they want to analyze in the reporting, always keeping in mind the bigger centralized structure of the different reports. The personalized views of the end users can be saved and they can easily navigate back to their partially tailored dashboards.”

To ensure consistency and comparability, group-wide definitions of measures were defined to create a single source of truth. Previously, affiliates and HQ SBUs often worked with different definitions in their reports, which meant figures could represent different things and were difficult to compare. Standardization has resolved this issue: today there is one way of reporting, based on shared definitions and key figures, ensuring clarity and full comparability across the organization. 

The dashboards also provide a consistent view of the data from management and employee perspectives. This increases cost efficiency by avoiding duplication of functions and creates transparency by having one shared version of the truth.

Action-driven reporting

In the old BO system, users mainly worked with tables. While these provided information, they required significant time for analysis and interpretation - business needs had outgrown this approach.

“Our goals was to replace static tables with action-driven reports,” says Fleur Snauwaert. “At a glance, users should see whether performance meets targets and how it compares to last year or to defined goals.

Key insights and high-level conclusions should be immediately visible, with the option to drill down effortlessly into the details through interactive drill-through pages.

Reconciliation and KPI standardization in Power BI

One of the key challenges was reconciling the old reporting in BO with the new Power BI key figures. The move to S/4 HANA required the team to rebuild definitions from scratch.

This created the opportunity to standardize definitions such as Net Sales and Discounts, across all affiliates. In the past, exceptions were often granted locally. Today, the goal is to maintain uniform definitions at the group level.

The shift, however, created reconciliation conflicts. Figures in the new model do not always match historic reports. Explaining and mapping the cause of these discrepancies is essential. Managing this change is complex because of its scope and impact on both local entities and headquarters.

Scalable performance

Another major challenge was making sure the reporting setup could scale to more than 1,000 users, often with 50–100 concurrent sessions. “This required us to critically review every part of the data model and reporting flows,” explains Anke Paelman.

We optimized datasets and crucial calculations, and performed extensive stress testing to ensure the system would hold up under real-life workloads. Performance tuning wasn’t just about speed; it was also about user adoption. Reports had to load fast enough for busy affiliates and HQ users to integrate them into their daily decision-making.

The transition from SAP BW/BO to Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI provided the flexibility to design a new, more efficient data model. Instead of relying on a single monolithic system, multiple streamlined datasets were created, each fit for purpose. This to achieve stable, high-performance reporting across the organization without compromising on detail or user experience.

The Big Bang roll-out of sales dashboards

The result was a successful roll-out of standardized sales dashboards to all European affiliates in a single coordinated effort. Internally, this became known as the “Big Bang", a both stressful and rewarding experience: in April and May, a new roll-out was scheduled nearly every day for either sales employees or sales managers.

Training liaisons to drive adoption

The journey started in December 2023 with the first go-live in Belgium, involving 120 users. Following this pilot, the company started to train key users – called liaisons – from all affiliates. These liaisons are key users of the power bi reports and datasets and came to HQ for in-depth training on the new reports, semantic models, and functionalities developed in the months leading up to the roll-out. They also provided crucial input to ensure each affiliate was ready for its go-live.

Hyper care and ongoing support

After each rollout, affiliates received intensive hyper care support to ensure a smooth transition into daily operations. Once stabilized, ownership was gradually handed over to the operational teams, supported by extensive documentation and coaching of the operational supporting team..

Scaling user adoption across Europe

By May 2024, after 14 affiliates had gone live, the company already had 915 monthly users on the system. The focus has since shifted to user adoption: helping affiliates better understand the reports and embedding them into decision-making processes to further increase usage.