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Practical perspectives on data governance, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI and analytics strategy for UK organisations.
What AI can’t do for a mid-market business, and where it goes wrong
The most expensive AI mistakes are not technical failures - they are buying something AI cannot actually do in your situation. Understanding the genuine limits of the technology is more useful, right now, than any capability list on a vendor slide.
Getting your Business Central data into Power BI: the options
Business Central holds a substantial part of your operational truth: sales, purchasing, inventory, and more finance. Power BI is where that truth becomes visible and usable. Getting it right first time avoids a category of report reliability problems that are genuinely hard to unpick later.
Is Power BI Copilot worth turning on, and what it needs first
Power BI Copilot can write DAX, summarise reports and build visuals from a prompt, but whether that saves your team meaningful time depends almost entirely on how mature your semantic model is underneath it. The feature is real; the value is conditional.
Consolidating multiple Business Central companies in one model
Running more than one Business Central company is common in group structures, but consolidating reporting across them is where the pain starts. Mismatched CoA's, manual intercompany txs, and no single view of group performance. Solving this is a data architecture decision, not a reporting one.
Off-the-shelf AI features versus building your own
Building your own AI model sounds like the serious option, but for most mid-market businesses it is the slow, expensive and unnecessary one. The question worth asking is not whether you could build it. It is whether the off-the-shelf alternative is close enough to already be winning.
Business Central to Microsoft Fabric: when it is worth it
Moving your Business Central data into Microsoft Fabric is not an upgrade, it is a shift in what becomes possible. When your operational ERP data sits inside Fabric alongside everything else, the questions you can ask and the speed at which you can answer them change considerably.
Power BI or Business Central’s built-in reporting?
Business Central's built-in reports are fine for what they were designed to do, but they were designed for transaction confirmation, not analysis. Power BI does not replace Business Central's reporting: it takes over where BC's reporting sensibly stops.
The Business Central reports a finance team needs
Finance teams using Business Central often end up exporting data into Excel because the reports they actually need - aged debt, cashflow position, budget vs actuals by department - either do not exist in BC or cannot be trusted without manual adjustment. There is a better way to build them once.
Basket Analysis On Data You Already Have
The products your customers buy together are already telling you something useful. Most businesses just never ask the question. Basket analysis does not require a data scientist or a specialist tool; it needs the transaction data you almost certainly already have.
Pyramid, Power BI or Fabric: Which One, and When
There is no best analytics platform, only the right tool for the job. Here is what Power BI, Fabric and Pyramid are each best at, and how to tell which you need.
Natural language analytics. Letting people ask the data questions, without a new platform.
Asking your data a question in plain English sounds like a feature for the future, but it is already in the tools many mid-market businesses are paying for today. The harder question is whether the answer you get back is one you can trust.
Already Running Pyramid Analytics? The Sensible Next Move
If you already run Pyramid Analytics, the ServiceNow acquisition is reassurance, not a reason to panic. Here is the sensible posture and the one thing worth doing now.
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