The Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration is a powerful fusion. One is a business intelligence tool that enables today’s businesses to become data-driven. The other helps you know what’s happening inside business functions, and manage business processes, too.
In this article, you will learn about Power BI, and Dynamics 365. You will find a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to easily Integrate Power BI-Dynamics 365. Let’s start!
What is Power BI?
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Power BI is a Business Analytics tool. Microsoft released it in 2011. In general, Power BI is a cloud-agnostic solution that offers a collection of services and products which helps users visualize data. Now, for years, Power BI has been among the top best Business Intelligence tools for the non-technical user category. The reason stretches from its easy-to-use self-service offerings to the business-friendly prices for professional users. To learn more about Power BI, click here.
Key Features of Power BI
Let’s discuss some advantages of Power BI to get a better understanding.
- As a self-service product, Power BI is fairly easy to learn and requires no training.
- Files are easy to share within the team structure. A cloud-based environment ensures visualization is refreshed for all, whenever datasets are updated by one user.
- A powerful navigation algorithm empowers users to find content quickly.
- Power BI can leverage the offerings of Azure Machine Learning and can create new machine learning models, too.
Power BI Solution Products
The Power BI solution is a host to the following individual products and services, let’s talk about them in a brief:
- Power BI Service: The service allows users to view dashboards, reports, and other Power BI applications. You can access Power BI Service via mobile or desktop browser. Know more about Power BI Service.
- Power BI Desktop: Using the service, users create detailed analytics reports. The service is free and self-serviced hence popular amongst data scientists and developers.
- Power BI Pro: Power BI Pro comes with a monthly fee of $10 per user. Using the service, in contrast with that of the Power BI’s, users can seamlessly collaborate, share reports and visualizations to other users making it a perfect enterprise-grade solution.
- Power BI Premium: Power BI Premium comes with an added data security firewall from the Microsoft-hosted cloud. Of course, the features of a cloud storage facility act as add-ons. This enterprise-grade solution is best for today’s startup needs because the operations are easy to scale up or down based on your immediate need.
- Power BI Report Server: The service is built on-premise, which means it’s best for companies with restrictions on cloud usage.
- Power BI Mobile: Power BI Mobile is a set of applications, especially for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices.
- Power BI Embedded: Power BI Embedded allows users to constitute BI dashboards and reports, within or outside the organization, with or without a Power BI account.
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What is Dynamics 365
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Dynamics 365 belongs to the Microsoft family of Business Intelligence apps. The solution promises to combine the features of a CRM and an ERP. And, the application of services ranges from sales to marketing and finance — providing maximum flexibility by making available a centralized view into business processes leveraging operations data. To develop a deeper understanding of Dynamics 365, dive into a comprehensive guide by following this link!
Key Features of Dynamics 365
Let’s discuss key features of Dynamics 365 to get a few more insights.
- Dynamics 365 is highly adaptable to your business needs: You can choose and then with time start integrating more applications into your business operations. On a brighter note, Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based product, hence it is accessible from any device, including mobile phones.
- Powerful analytics means better decision-making: Dynamics 365 provides a powerful Data Virtualization environment that can help you analyze business data.
- Dynamics 365 belongs to the Microsoft family of BI solutions, hence is built on Microsoft Azur: Moreover, being GDPR compliant means your organization need not worry about any restrictions when it comes to complying with a country/region’s data protection laws — it makes it easier for organizations to comply with existing laws set by the authorities.
What is the need for Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration?
The need for the Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration has grown to become vital for two reasons:
- The two software complement each other’s capabilities well.
- The Power BI-Dynamics Integration empowers sales teams to make informed decisions, and fork-out data-driven insights better.
Benefits of Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration
The takeaway: Leveraging Power BI’s business intelligence features using business data present in Dynamics 365 CRM, organizations can dive deeper into checks and balances. For example, if data is available, you can seamlessly rate customer happiness scores and navigate through bottlenecks in your sales processes.
Let’s further simplify and state key benefits of the Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration:
- No manual data interpretation means fewer human errors.
- Predictive analytics helps increase business in key markets.
- Well-structured data and visualization make information easy to understand.
- Reactive data analytics has become a relic of the past. Proactive data analytics is now the industry standard.
- Leverage the advanced capabilities of Power BI, empowered by sophisticated AI & ML algorithms to make innovative use of data siloed in Dynamics 365.
Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration
Before starting off with the Power BI-Dynamics Integration process, let’s learn about the prerequisites.
Prerequisites
- Administrative rights on Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Visual Studio are required for the concerned teams.
- The concerned Team must have login credentials for PowerBI.com.
- The Power BI desktop must be installed. Login credentials will remain the same as that of PowerBI.com.
Now let’s jump to the step-by-step guide to learn about the Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration process!
Step 1: Establish Power BI- Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Connect
- To initiate the Power BI-Dynamics Integration process, first, you will need to register your system. To proceed with the registration process, log in to Azure Portal and register as shown below:
Image Credits: PowerObjects
- After the registration, a Client ID and Key will be generated. Copy and save them to proceed.
Image Credits: PowerObjects
- Now, to process, you must log in to your Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations instance. Start with the linking process with PowerBI.com, as shown below:
System Administrator > Setup > Power BI
Note: The credentials filled in the form remain the same as that of PowerBI.com.
Step 2: Establish the Power BI- Dynamics 365 (Desktop) for Finance and Operations Database Connect
- After logging into the Power BI desktop, with your PowerBI.com credential, click on the ‘Get Data‘ option and then ‘SQL server‘ as shown below:
- Up next, you will need to enter the ‘Server‘ and ‘Database‘ details. And ensure that the ‘Data Connectivity Mode‘ is set to ‘DirectQuery‘ always. Click on ‘OK‘ to proceed.
Image Credits: PowerObjects
- Once the connection is established, you can see all the Aggregate measures in Dynamic 365 will appear. Choose the required measure for the report and continue.
Image Credits: PowerObjects
- The Aggregate measures can be used in designing and developing processes for a new PowerBi report. And once the report is ready, you can publish it to the suggested workspace on PowerBI.com. Once the report is published, it will appear on PowerBI.com.
Image Credits: PowerObjects
Conclusion
Learning about customers’ preferences leaves cascading effects on the product development journey. Hence, it becomes paramount to leverage customer data to understand how a customer behaves at a certain point in the customer life cycle. Enter the Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration.
The Power BI-Dynamics 365 Integration will help your sales teams get onto the holistic growth track — from your sales teams tracking new leads and opportunities, to monitoring new trends and customer acquisition journeys. But, to execute the above-mentioned, you must have a secure, self-service, and automated data pipeline for smooth, ultra-efficient ETL processes — and, Hevo can help!
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Yash is a Content Marketing professinal with experience in data-driven marketing campaigns. He has expertise in strategic thinking, integrated marketing, and customer acquisition. She has driven growth for startups and established brands through comprehensive marketing communications, and digital strategies.