Microsoft Fabric

A Fabric project is decided by your sources, long before the platform.

Seven Business Central instances. Seven CRMs. Some SAP, some Nav, some Sage and two line-of-business applications nobody documents. That is where data projects bog down, and it is the ground we work on.

Business Central instances consolidated onto one model

The number changes, the model stays one

Projects delivered since 2019: 100+
Clients supported: 70+
Range of a Fabric project: 30-150 d
Expert consultants: 11

Our speciality

Several instances of the same ERP

Four companies in the same group, four Business Central instances, and the same customer coded differently in each one. We add an alignment step before any consolidation: the references come together, and the model returns a single figure.

Le même client, quatre codes différents

Brancher quatre bases est facile. Les faire tomber d’accord est le vrai travail, et c’est l’étape que nous ajoutons avant toute consolidation.

The most frequent case among our clients, and the most underestimated when quoting. We have taken up to seven Business Central instances and seven CRMs onto one model. At that volume we export with bc2adls rather than through the API: the load is incremental and does not consume your ERP quotas.

The starting point

Everything is decided upstream of the dashboard

When several departments of the same company announce three different revenue figures for the same month, the problem is not in the tool that displays them. It is upstream: every report has recoded its own definition, on its own extract, at its own pace.

Multiply that by the number of subsidiaries, add an acquisition that brought in a second ERP, and you get the situation we meet most often: a company with plenty of data and few figures it can rely on.

Microsoft Fabric answers exactly that. Not by producing prettier charts, but by making the data reliable before it is visualised.

The method

The medallion architecture, in three layers

This is the model we apply on every Fabric project. Its advantage is that it reads as well to a board as to a technical team.

BronzeIngestion: Raw data, exactly as the systems produce it. ERP, CRM, Dataverse, SQL databases, files.
SilverCleaning: Cleaning rules and business alignment. This is where the charts of accounts of six subsidiaries are reconciled.
GoldSemantic model: Aggregated and optimised data. One source of truth, shared by every report and every department.

Your sources

ERPBusiness Central, F&O, SAP, Sage…2
CRMSalesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot…1
Payroll & HRSilae, Lucca, ADP…1
Line-of-business softwareSQL databases, bespoke applications0
FilesExcel, CSV, manual exports1

The medallion model. Each layer adds value to the one before it: bronze for data exactly as it arrives, silver for data aligned and transformed, gold for consolidated data.

01 · BronzeSources

2 × ERPBusiness Central, F&O, SAP, Sage…
CRMSalesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot…
Payroll & HRSilae, Lucca, ADP…
FilesExcel, CSV, manual exports

02 · SilverAlignment and transformation

Mapping tablesCharts of accounts, dimensions, reference data
Composite keysEvery record keeps the entity it came from
Cleaning and business rulesThe rule is written here, once

03 · GoldConsolidation

Consolidated tablesEvery source against one set of references
Group viewEvery entity brought together, with nothing counted twice

04 · ServingModel and applications

Semantic modelMeasures and relationships, one definition each
Power BI applicationBy department: sales, finance, purchasing…
ExcelThe same model, as a pivot table

What we recommend

Fabric, with an alignment step

Order of magnitude45 to 90 days

Several instances of the same software call for an alignment step before consolidation. Once that step is done the rest of the chain is standard, and your figures carry the same meaning from one department to the next.

You have 2 instances of the same kind of source. This is where the project is won: charts of accounts, dimensions and reference data almost always diverge from one entity to the next. The alignment happens before any consolidation, and it leaves your existing setups exactly as they are.

And where do you start? Two hours with a consultant, and you get the steps in order, each with a range in days, costed on your own sources.

Book a scoping workshop →

These orders of magnitude come from our past projects. They do not replace a scoping workshop: data volumes, the real state of the data and the number of business rules weigh as much as the number of sources.

Two hours to sharpen it →

What consolidating means

Eight systems, one figure

Your systems arrive as they are in a first layer, time-stamped. A second layer aligns the reference data, charts of accounts, dimensions and customers, and settles the duplicates. A third sets one definition per indicator. Reports, Excel and your applications then all read the same thing.

Eight systems, one revenue figure

Wiring the sources in is the easy part. Agreeing on what each figure means is the project.

We have reconciled up to seven Business Central instances and seven CRMs onto one model. The difficulty grows with the number of reference sets to align, more than with the volume of data.

Our ground

Multi-source, concretely

Here are the kinds of scope we deliver. The clients are not named, but the volumes are real.

Examples of delivered Fabric scopes
Context	Sources consolidated	Order of magnitude
Multi-company group	Six Business Central SaaS instances, complete scope	A long project, the full chain delivered
Trading group	Seven Business Central SaaS instances and seven CRMs	A long project, sales and finance consolidated
Industrial group	SAP, Business Central, Dynamics NAV, Sage and bespoke business applications	A long project, a heterogeneous information system

Those three scopes have one thing in common: none of them started from a homogeneous information system. That is the normal situation, and it is the one we work in.

The sequence

What a complete chain means

Source analysis
Before connecting anything, we look at what the data is worth at the source: setup differences between entities, duplicated reference data, free-text fields used for something other than their intended purpose. This is the step failed projects skip.
Architecture and ingestion
The platform and the ingestion flows into the Bronze layer are put in place, handling the refresh rhythm proper to each source.
Business rules and semantic model
The heart of the work. Business alignment in the Silver layer, then building the semantic model in Gold: tables, relationships, measures. It is that model that decides whether your figures will be consistent.
Historical load
Migration and clean-up of existing data, so that analysis does not begin on the go-live date.
Reports and consistency checks
Reports are built, then checked figure by figure against the source systems. A report that does not reconcile with the ERP will never be used.
Workshops and handover
Training for the business teams and handing over what it takes to keep the platform alive without us. We do not try to make our clients dependent.

Our reading

What Fabric brings, and from what point

Strengths and limits of Microsoft Fabric
	What it brings you
Unification	Ingestion, storage, transformation and serving on one platform, without multiplying tools or contracts.
Industrialisation	Git versioning, deployment pipelines, monitoring: changes stop being artisanal.
Sharing	One semantic model serves several reports, several departments and the Excel users.
Room to grow	Native openness towards real time, AI and the uses that do not exist yet.

Going further

Three questions that deserve their own page

Frequently asked

What people ask us most

Should we move to Microsoft Fabric, or is Power BI enough?

Power BI on its own is enough as long as your sources are few, stable and clean. It reaches its limits when the information system is heterogeneous, when business rules have to be shared between several reports, or when several departments produce different figures for the same question. Fabric becomes relevant at that point: it makes the data reliable before it is visualised, instead of recoding the same logic in every report.

How long does a Fabric build take?

Our Fabric projects run from 30 to 150 days depending on the number of sources and the complexity of the business rules. A narrow scope on a single source fits in a few weeks. A complete platform consolidating several ERPs and CRMs, with historical data, a semantic model, reports, user workshops and consistency checks, runs into months.

Can several Business Central instances be consolidated?

Yes, and it is a case we handle regularly. We have delivered platforms consolidating up to seven Business Central SaaS instances on a complete scope, as well as projects combining Business Central with several CRMs. The difficulty is not technical: it comes from the setup differences between entities, charts of accounts, dimensions, item references, which have to be aligned before any consolidation.

Which data sources can you connect?

Business Central, Dynamics NAV, SAP, Sage 100, Sage 1000, Salesforce, Lucca, along with SQL databases and software specific to one client. In practice the question is almost never whether we can connect, but what the data is worth at the source: that is what we look at first.

What does a Microsoft Fabric capacity cost?

Microsoft offers two modes. On shared capacity, every user who opens a report needs a Power BI Pro licence. On dedicated capacity, end users no longer need an individual licence to read, but the capacity itself is billed. The trade-off depends mostly on the number of readers: beyond a certain threshold, dedicated capacity becomes cheaper. We cost this during the scoping workshop, before any commitment, and we go into the detail on our pricing and capacities page.

Is Fabric mature enough for a mid-sized company?

Fabric is a young platform evolving fast: it calls for a period of getting to grips with it, and some functions still move from one release to the next. We say so to our clients before we start. In return the architecture is sound and open: what is built today stays usable tomorrow, and the platform absorbs new uses without a rebuild.

Two hours to find out whether Fabric is the right answer for you.

Eleven expert consultantsSaint-Priest, near Lyon, France

A scoping workshop with a consultant, without commitment: we look at your sources, your volumes and your business rules, and we tell you what we would do. If Power BI on its own is enough, we will say so, which is faster for everyone.

Request a scoping workshop

Scoping workshop · 2 hours · free