The Future of Operations study series provides our partners with deep insight into the small to medium sized business segment.
We invest in quantitative data to support your ability to respond ahead of emerging demand.
To help our partners monetise demand trends in the study, we’ve matched solutions from our portfolio to analysis of SMB objectives, prioritised IT actions and adoption intent within the study.
In this article, we’ll cover how partners can help customers advance objectives to drive more value from business data, using Power BI integrated with Business Central.
Data is no longer just a byproduct of business operations. It’s a vital strategic asset, capable of informing decisions, revealing opportunities, automating workflows, and personalising experiences. It’s also the lifeblood of the new AI technology wave.
Acquiring data isn’t the challenge. Most businesses are awash with the stuff – sales data, stock data, operational data, performance data, customer data… the list goes on.
Yet many SMBs still struggle to connect disparate sources and systems in ways that allow them to extract genuine, actionable business intelligence (BI) from the mountains of data generated every day.
However, our recent study into SMB operations across the APAC region shows that making better use of business data is a critical objective for the majority.
In fact:
Source: The Future of Operations, Advancing AI=Driven Innovation and Cloud Agility for Small and Medium Sized Businesses, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Crayon, March 2025.
Unless they have a data scientist on the payroll, most smaller businesses will be challenged to find golden needles of insight buried in the enormous data haystack.
They need the power to create real-time dashboards, custom reports and intuitive data visualisations that allow them to extract more accessible, more meaningful insights – without anyone requiring a data science degree.
As a result, there is a wave of demand for external expertise to implement the necessary tools and workflows, which is where partners like you come in.
By integrating Microsoft Power BI directly into Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can provide your SMB clients with a powerful analytics tool capable of informing smarter and more valuable decisions.
Business intelligence isn’t just about capturing, collating, and crunching more data. It’s about being able to ask the right questions of the right datasets to extract quite specific and actionable answers in the right format.
It’s one thing to know that sales are unexpectedly down this month. It’s quite another to be able to dig deeper into the data and reveal why.
The missing piece in the SMB analytics toolkit is often a flexible way to not only interrogate data but visualise findings in ways that are easily understood by anyone in the business.
The right Business Intelligence tool can help SMBs to cut through the noise and uncover real meaning:
In short, Business Intelligence drives value from data by making it understandable, and actionable.
Power BI – now part of the Microsoft Fabric platform – fills these needs beautifully.
Power BI equips you with the tools to help your SMB clients see their business more clearly.
Crucially, Power BI leverages the full Microsoft 365 ecosystem, meaning it works with and within standard toolsets your customers likely already using – such as Word, Excel and Microsoft Teams.
That means fewer hurdles, faster deployment and a clear path to demonstrating increased return on existing investments.
When combined with Microsoft’s Cloud ERP for SMBs, Business Central, you can provide your clients with a proven backbone for digital operations, and the means to start unlocking the value of their business data.
Power BI connects seamlessly to Business Central, enabling dynamic dashboards and drill-down reports across key functions – finance, sales, purchasing, inventory and more.
In May 2023, Microsoft announced the integration of Power BI into Microsoft Fabric, a unified data platform that combines data engineering, data integration, real-time analytics, and business intelligence under one roof.
This now means not only can Power BI be integrated with Business Central, it paves the way for engaging customers in full-stack analytics solutions using the Microsoft Fabric platform.
So, what’s changed?
Power BI Pro and PPU remain available, and these are well suited for SMBs with simple dashboard needs.
Capacity-based Power BI Premium SKUs (P1–P5) are being replaced by Fabric capacities (F-SKUs), allowing access to a wider array of services such as Data Factory pipelines, Lakehouse storage, Synapse Data Warehousing, and AI modelling.
Partners can now offer design, deployment and governance services across the entire Microsoft data stack – not just dashboards.
APAC SMBs are ready to move from data collection to data action.
And they’re looking for IT partners with the expertise and tools to guide them on that journey.
By helping SMBs integrate Power BI with Business Central, your customers can use data to see what matters most in their business, and you become the partner that matters most to their long-term strategic goals.
Reposition your business beyond the usual infrastructure and licensing services by moving into SMB analytics consulting and BI dashboard design. Make Power BI a central part of a managed service, complete with:
You can also tap into Microsoft incentives and bundling opportunities by offering Power BI and Microsoft Fabric as part of a broader data strategy. Upsell services like cloud data warehousing, ERP optimisation, and AI-driven forecasting.
Power BI (now within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem) runs on Microsoft’s secure, scalable cloud infrastructure – so you and your clients don’t need to worry about data loss or limits.
Build industry-specific dashboards or role-based reporting templates to match each client’s individual requirements and use case.
Power BI is more than dashboards. It’s an opportunity to tap into the growing demand for data-driven business operations.
If you’re ready to seize the moment and move up the value chain into Data Solutions and Services, now’s the time to talk to Crayon about Power BI and Business Central.
Data Solutions and Services is a rich and deep field of opportunity for partners.
If you’re curious about expanding your practice in this direction, we’re standing by to help you get underway.
Simply enter “Power BI and Business Central’ into the free text field when you leave your details, and we’ll be in touch to get a conversation started around:
Thank you for your interest in Power BI and Business Central. One of our team will be in touch with you in the near future.
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