The Benefits of Upgrading From SSRS to Power BI

Problem:
A company was debating shifting away from SSRS reports and upgrading to Power Bi as the business’s reports platform. The scope of this change presented a huge undertaking for the company. They had nearly one thousand SSRS reports, many of which had not been used in years. These unused reports were one off fixes for problems that are no longer relevant. The processes powering them were still running in the background, eating up server resources. The company needed to identify these unused reports cut them off and upgrade reports in use to Power Bi.

Solution:
Due to the scope of the project, we started by identifying which reports most crucially needed to be converted and which reports were fine operating in SSRS. After converting these reports, utilizing the SSRS reporting database we identified the reports not being used and began the slow process of turning off the processes powering them. We could have just deleted these processes, but the fear was that they might have an inadvertent effect on production data, thus we painstakingly followed each process from start to finish to ensure production data would not be impacted. After working through each unused report, we began converting the remainder of the reports from SSRS to Power Bi.

Outcome:
The ability to interact with data in Power Bi reports is far superior to that of SSRS reports. Instead of running a report and then waiting for several minutes and getting one set of results in SSRS, when employees used the Power Bi version of the same report they could simply move a filter slider to filter the entire set of data. This ability to interact with data led to more effective use of reporting from the company’s employees which ultimately led to an overall increase in the company’s operations. In addition, the removal of processes no longer in use drastically reduced query times and simplified the overall data environment.