Power BI Migration Journey: Overcoming SAP BO Legacy Challenges for a Real Estate Agency

The client is a UK mutual housing and care provider managing multiple houses across England. They develop new-build, shared ownership and private sale properties. Their broader mission emphasizes improving people’s lives through high-quality homes, tenant engagement, and care programming.

The Challenge: Absence of Unified Data Insight

In order to curate the best experience for customers and resolve queries as quickly as possible, the client had created multiple visualization tools to analyze customer data, challenges, and the current status of customer issues. Let’s see how this vision resulted in cumbersome processes for the client.

• Multiple Visualization Tools: Multiple visualization tools were used to fetch data from various sources, making it harder to generate a ‘single source of truth’. Supporting and maintaining different tools also required duplicate effort in licensing, system upkeep, and training. Migrating or aligning data between tools added significant hidden costs due to overlaps and inefficiencies.
• Lack of Technology Architecture Standardization: As different tools were being used, each report looked different, functioned differently, and followed its own workflow. This caused delays in decision-making and hindered collaboration across teams.
• Disconnected Data Sources: Power BI and SAP BO reports fetched data from different systems, resulting in inconsistencies between reports and a lack of unified insights.
• Legacy Reports: Due to undocumented logic, the old SAP BO reports became increasingly complex, making it difficult to develop Power BI compatible data models or SQL queries using the new data source

The Solution: SAP BO to Power BI Migration

The real estate agency didn’t just want new dashboards. Instead, they wanted a simpler, smarter way to view and manage their data. Here is how the Datamatics team stepped in and helped the client create a ‘Single Source of Truth’ with the SAP BO to Power BI migration.

• Understanding of SAP BO Reports Before initiating the task, the team studied existing SAP BO reports thoroughly to understand the data origin, the logic behind the data reports and dashboard generation process, and the output. This step was fundamental for recreating original and accurate reports in the Power BI setup.
• Evaluation of Tool-Based Migration The team then explored automated tools to migrate reports from SAP BO to Power BI. However, these tools could only extract metadata and displayed only 50% accuracy. As a result, the team had to undertake manual processes to migrate the data.
• Manual Re-Creation of Power BI Reports and Dashboards Since automated migration tools worked with only 50% accuracy, Datamatics rebuilt all reports manually and maintained a consistent look, filters, KPIs, and insights from SAP BO while leveraging Power BI’s modern capabilities
• Building the Power BI Data Model Since SAP BO and Power BI pulled data from different systems, the team mapped tables and columns between the two systems to rebuild the data model in Power BI and write the necessary SQL queries.
• Creation of As-Is Power BI Reports & Dashboards To ensure business continuity, they developed “as-is” versions of the original reports in Power BI, replicating existing reports with added filtering features, making data exploration more interactive for users.
• UAT Support and Post-Migration Support To ensure a smooth transition from SAP BO to Power BI, the Datamatics team extended continuous post-migration support and resolved any issues