A mid-sized technology services and consulting company needed to improve how it managed and tracked resource allocation across its teams. Previously, the leadership team relied on complex Excel spreadsheets with macros and logic to monitor utilization. While this process
worked, for an organization of its size, tracking such a critical function through manual spreadsheets was both limiting and unsustainable.
The organization recognized the need for a more modern, automated solution – one that would consolidate information from multiple data sources, provide real-time insights, and create a more meaningful foundation for leadership discussions about staffing, utilization, and project delivery. By implementing Power BI Paginated Reports and interactive Power BI visuals, the company aimed to transform its manual process into a dynamic, data-driven reporting environment.
CHALLENGE
Each week, the organization’s leadership team met to review resource utilization at the company, department, and individual level – using an Excel spreadsheet. While the spreadsheet was carefully designed and served its purpose, it took a long time to pull together and massage the data in the way the leadership team required. In many ways, Excel was no longer in lockstep with the company’s advanced technical capabilities – or the scale of its operations.
Running resource reports out of the company’s time-entry system was inefficient for multiple reasons:
- Manual upkeep and time – Executives often had to spend half a day manually pulling reports and overlaying them with other datasets. Continuously updating and maintaining the spreadsheet took a lot of time.
- Lack of granularity – Leadership could see summary-level data but lacked the ability to drill into details like task-level entries or discrepancies across systems.
- Lack of consistency – Metrics such as billable hours, leave hours, and availability were tracked through multiple systems, but there was no consistency in terms of where the data was pulled from.
- Reactive view – Managers could only “view” this shared spreadsheet secondhand, which created friction and limited visibility as it was in a read-only capacity. This left most of the team dependent on a small group of leaders for updates.
- Inefficient decision-making – The result was more time spent questioning data than acting on it. Leaders had limited visibility into historical trends. Conversations often centered on tactical fixes rather than strategic decisions about workload distribution, hiring needs, or client delivery.
It was clear that the company needed an automated approach that could bring data from multiple systems into one unified view, enabling more proactive decision-making. Power BI Paginated Reports and customized Power BI visuals emerged as the ideal tools to address these needs – combining scalability, interactivity, and data accuracy in one platform.
SOLUTION
The company’s data team designed a platform that would automate data flows, consolidate multiple sources, and present insights in a single, interactive dashboard. Using Power BI Paginated Reports alongside modern Power BI visuals, leadership gained access to a powerful combination of reports and dynamic, drill-down dashboards.
Instead of manual updates, SQL Server scripts now transformed data into structured tables, which were then connected to Power BI through API integrations and dynamic URLs for real-time visualization and paginated reporting.
Key aspects included:
- Direct system integrations with PierVantage (time entry system), Bamboo (leave management solution), JIRA (project management tool), and Zendesk (support tickets) using databases and APIs.
- Enhanced data granularity, capturing transaction-level entries so leaders could drill down from summary utilization percentages into detailed line items, complete with employee comments against each of those line items.
- Cross-system validation, aligning Bamboo leave records with PierVantage time entries to highlight discrepancies and establish Bamboo as the “golden record” for personal time off (PTO).
- Dynamic reporting features, such as clickable JIRA ticket links, searchable Zendesk data views, and historical PTO usage trends. Power BI Paginated Reports allowed detailed, formatted reports suitable for leadership reviews, while Power BI visuals enabled interactive analysis for department managers.
- Automated refresh, where SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) ran ETL scripts to update transformed datasets, allowing Power BI Paginated Reports and visuals to instantly refresh dashboards with the latest information.
Ultimately, with a single refresh, leadership gained access to up-to-date utilization reports, cross-system validation, and dynamic drilldowns -all powered by Power BI Paginated Reports and Power BI visuals within a scalable analytics environment.
RESULTS
The transition from spreadsheets to an integrated, automated Power BI Paginated Reports system changed the nature of resource management at the organization. The biggest benefit was that meetings became more strategic, with conversations shifting to workload distribution, early signs of burnout, and future hiring needs.
Additional benefits included:
- Significant time savings – Pulling utilization reports and manually reconciling them dropped from half a day each week to about an hour – a 90% reduction through Power BI Paginated Reports automation.
- Improved visibility – Leadership now gains real-time insight into utilization, billable vs. non-billable hours, leave balances, and support workloads – all visualized through interactive Power BI visuals tied directly to company profitability.
- Empowered managers – The effectiveness of weekly utilization reviews has shifted from centralized oversight to distributed ownership, allowing managers to explore insights directly through Power BI dashboards and visuals.
- Proactive planning – The platform surfaces/flags early indicators of underutilization, burnout, or overlapping PTO, allowing adjustments to be made before issues escalate.
- More meaningful conversations – Resource meetings now focus on meaningful conversations about team capacity, hiring needs, and project prioritization rather than manual data entry/review.
- Advanced analytics – With Power BI Paginated Reports and detailed Power BI visuals, leadership moved from static reporting to continuous analysis, leveraging KPIs to uncover trends that were previously hidden.
- Scalable architecture – By building on SQL and Power BI, the company created a flexible foundation that could later be extended to other data visualization platforms (if needed).
Ultimately, the new Power BI Paginated Reports–based approach provided a single source of truth for resource allocation, empowered leadership with actionable insights, and established a scalable foundation for smarter, data-driven decision-making across the organization.