Transforming Power BI reporting and efficiency for paving contractor 

Client background

​​​Let’s Pave is a leading paving services contractor with enterprise customers throughout North America. They are located in Oak Brook, Illinois.

The business challenge

The Let’s Pave IT team automated their data collection and implemented a good analytics framework; however, leadership was concerned about extended timelines for turning data into actionable insights. To accelerate and enhance their analytics capabilities, Let’s Pave partnered with Baker Tilly’s Digital Solutions team. Baker Tilly augmented Let’s Pave’s technical expertise by providing full-time data professionals and on-demand specialists, helping build custom analytics solutions that drive the business forward. 

Even with a solid foundation, Let’s Pave encountered a few critical challenges in their analytics journey: 

• Delayed insights: Data and reports had to pass through multiple steps and manual processes, slowing down decision-making.  
• Inconsistent best practices: Let’s Pave’s Power BI reports and data model, though working, hadn’t incorporated all industry best practices. 
• Scaling and governance: As the use of Power BI grew, Let’s Pave needed to ensure their solution would scale and remain governable. 

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly began with a comprehensive Power BI environment assessment to get a clear picture of Let’s Pave’s current state. The findings revealed a mix of strengths including a robust data pipeline and an A+ deployment rating, and opportunities for improvement to streamline their semantic model and improve some processes (e.g., automating Power BI deployments via Azure pipelines). Interviews with Let’s Pave stakeholders revealed high engagement and appetite for improvement. With these findings, Baker Tilly and Let’s Pave agreed on a plan to address the gaps. The overarching goal was to leverage what was working well (automation and DevOps) and improve the areas that would deliver faster, richer insights.  

Baker Tilly and Let’s Pave structured the project into three key phases: 

1. Comprehensive Power BI assessment: In the first phase, Baker Tilly consultants worked closely with Let’s Pave’s IT team to review the entire analytics environment. This included scrutinizing data sources, data flows, Power BI data models, reports and the deployment process.  

2. Enhanced reporting and semantic model: The second phase focused on implementing improvements in Power BI reports and the semantic data model. Baker Tilly’s BI specialists collaborated with Let’s Pave IT to carry out several key enhancements: 

• Power BI gateway and live connectivity 
• Unified semantic model 
• Data model optimization 
• Report improvements and new dashboards

3. Ongoing data engineering support: Baker Tilly provided full-time data analytics resources to work alongside Let’s Pave’s IT staff, continually assisting in managing and improving the data pipeline and related systems. These resources helped with tasks such as integrating new data sources, refining SQL stored procedures and ensuring the data feeding the Power BI model stayed reliable and well-structured.  

By blending Let’s Pave’s deep business knowledge with Baker Tilly’s technical expertise, the company achieved its goal of more effective, data-driven decision making. Key results of this engagement include: 

• Faster, actionable insights: The time from data generation to report delivery shrank dramatically. By automating data ingestion and leveraging the on-premises gateway, reports that previously took days or weeks of preparation are now refreshed on a daily schedule or on-demand.  
• Improved reporting and decision-making: Let’s Pave now has a rich set of interactive dashboards and reports that cover operational, financial and strategic metrics. These reports, built on a trusted semantic model, provide a single version of the truth across the organization.  
• Enhanced performance and efficiency: The technical optimizations have paid off in smoother user experiences. The removal of redundant data processing steps (such as manual Excel work and repetitive calculations) has freed up IT staff’s time, letting them focus on higher-value activities. 
• Empowered team and sustainable solution: Through training sessions and close collaboration, Let’s Pave’s internal IT and analysts learned modern BI best practices firsthand. They gained experience with new techniques (like advanced DAX, data modeling and DevOps for BI) and are now confident in maintaining the system.  
• Scalability and future-readiness: The solution put in place is built to scale with Let’s Pave’s growth. The use of best-practice architecture (star schema model, proper ETL, etc.) and the flexible cloud-enabled setup mean that as data volumes increase or reporting needs expand, the platform can handle it. Security and governance measures ensure that even as the user count grows, data remains secure and access is well-managed.  

The collaboration between Let’s Pave and Baker Tilly continues to flourish. With a strong analytics foundation in place, Let’s Pave is looking ahead to even more advanced data initiatives. In upcoming phases, the company is exploring predictive analytics and forecasting, leveraging the rich historical data now available. Both teams are excited to build on the success of this Power BI transformation, keeping Let’s Pave at the forefront of using data to drive business forward.