Industry association implements Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Client background

This company is a top industry association headquartered in Washington, D.C. Their mission is to serve their industry and impact its success by helping its member organizations strengthen operations, mitigate risk and develop talent. The association also provides educational resources to help attract members and develop a strong workforce.

The business challenge

The association relied on legacy infrastructure and systems, including their existing data and reporting environment, which limited scalability and hindered data integration. They also experienced a lack of visibility into customer touchpoints and how departments interacted with customers. This resulted in inefficiencies, duplicated efforts and missed opportunities.

Additionally, siloed data within their legacy data ecosystem left them unable to efficiently analyze key metrics and KPIs across the organization. Non-standardized business definitions and lack of data governance led to confusion between teams.

Under Baker Tilly’s consulting guidance, the association participated in a Microsoft Fabric private preview, where they identified value and wanted to begin developing the solution further. Their goal was to implement Fabric as their new data platform and deliver comprehensive analytical capabilities to the association and its members.

Strategy and solution

The association began their journey with Baker Tilly when they decided to plan for the development of a modern data platform to support future growth and scale, using Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. They understood the value, speed and flexibility that Microsoft Fabric could bring to their team and wanted to plan the best path forward for adoption.

During the assessment and planning phase, Baker Tilly led the definition of the architectural foundation and conceptual solution components for the Microsoft Fabric and Power BI pilot solution. Baker Tilly collaborated with business stakeholders and subject matter experts from the association to identify and prioritize reporting use cases and business areas for modeling to drive data-driven insights. Our team provided recommendations on the use of Fabric and other Azure services to modernize their existing data platform and solve for identified use cases.

In the implementation phase, our team collaborated with the client to develop a working, end-to-end data platform utilizing a medallion architecture approach (Bronze, Silver and Gold layers) in Fabric. This included building data pipelines to ingest data from on-premises data sources into Fabric, developing an enterprise physical data model in a Fabric warehouse leveraging Fabric’s seamless integration with dbt to optimize data flow into stage, conformed, model and reporting warehouses within OneLake storage.

The team then developed an enterprise Semantic data model in Fabric. Next, we collaborated with business stakeholders to create, validate and publish reports for prioritized reporting use cases leveraging Power BI. Throughout development, Baker Tilly implemented best practices in Fabric and Power BI to deliver a long-term, sustainable solution.

Benefits of the final solution included:

• 360-degree client view: Developed a unified system that consolidates client data from all touchpoints, providing a holistic view of each client’s interactions.
• Improved member experience: Enhanced member satisfaction by ensuring seamless communication and personalized services.​
• Enhanced reporting and insights: Enable robust reporting and analytical capabilities for internal and external stakeholders to improve data-driven decision making.
• Modernized infrastructure: Replaced the outdated platform with a scalable, efficient and cost-effective solution that enables the association to aggregate and curate data from multiple systems and data sources.
• Efficiency: Streamlined processes, reduced duplicate efforts and improved response times.​
• Cost savings: Eliminated maintenance costs associated with outdated systems.​
• Extensibility: With a modern data platform in place, the association can now expand the solution to meet additional data and AI use cases.

As the association has already seen value from the solution, they are now looking to add data from a new member management application and expand their use of Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. Baker Tilly continues to work with them to create value using data and AI tools in the Microsoft ecosystem.