Thanks for clarifying — small misunderstanding on our end Understood that Microsoft Fabric is not an Epicor product.
we are into concrete precast manufacturing & installation, with 80+ projects running in parallel. We have 350+ jobs created dynamically, and finished goods are continuously produced, loaded, transported, and issued between production locations, stock yards, and multiple project sites.
Operationally, we need live visibility into:
Stock yard demographics (FG availability, movements, loading status by location)
Job-wise production vs dispatch status across plants
In-transit and site-issued finished goods
Billing status aligned with dispatch and installation progress
I believe realtime BI can push day-to-day planning, dispatch sequencing, and project-level decisions.
Our logistics team actually dreams of seeing live status like an airport departure board — jobs, loads, and trucks updating in real time rather than delayed snapshots.
That type of data should be data loads in the thousands of rows which normal SQL (BAQS) and dashboards should be able to handle just fine. If you aren’t trying to analyze years worth of data and only looking at love live status you shouldn’t need a BI tool to do that.
Edit: LIVE status… That’s what I get for typing a response on a my phone. Lol.
agree with @Banderson. I know people try to bend BI tools to work for real time scenarios, but that’s probably not the correct hammer for the job. I LOVE your vision and think it’s worth pursuing!
I like to look at McDonald’s for IT automation inspiration. They use BI for historical purposes to target users and run promotions but not for entering and delivering orders in the store.
Thanks for the use case example Mark. I love it when those are shared, I feel like it cements the principle way more than a long paragraph of text, but both are fun to read (to me).
Totally fair point and partially agreed, row volumes themselves aren’t the challenge.
Where we’re feeling the gap is less about analytics and more about operational orchestration. I mentioned data volume only to give scale context, not to imply everything must be solved with a BI tool. BAQs can handle the row counts.
Where we’re struggling is on the Kinetic side: no true drill-down dashboards, EDD instability (including an accepted defect blocking the 8th measure), and Kinetic trackers being slower than our Classic dashboards — also an acknowledged issue.
Power BI works best for us because it allows top-level to ground-level visualization (management overview → transaction levels) with clear, interactive data representation. also read above Microsoft Fabric helps reduce data-lag gaps
The funny part is that folks who grok data are the most effective working in Excel. Everyone else tries to use Excel as a database. What both groups share though is the subset of folks who paste tabular Excel data in email AS AN IMAGE. ಠ_ಠ Those people are wrong.
What are folks using Power Pivot for? I haven’t been won over yet. Feels weird to write DAX in Excel, but maybe it’s me that’s weird.
That’s what I mean, though. Data folks know datatypes and have earned a natural distrust of date and time records. They understand that a spreadsheet is for presentation rather than storage. And how to connect Excel to a data source so that a Ctrl-Alt-F5 makes presented data current and valid.
I’d argue those news stories aren’t an Excel problem but a failure to apply data skills to data work. Someone with data competency appropriate to those tasks wouldn’t have produced those problems. Anyone who can guide Pandas to correct datatypes will not be fooled by Excel.
“We could have blamed flight crews, individual pilots, maintenance personnel or controllers, but we didn’t because we have long, long recognized that human error is a symptom of a system that needs to be redesigned,”
Two approaches to the problem of human fallibility exist: the person and the
system approaches.
The person approach focuses on the errors of individuals, blaming them for
forgetfulness, inattention, or moral weakness
The system approach concentrates on the conditions under which individuals
work and tries to build defences to avert errors or mitigate their effects
High reliability organisations which have less than their fair share of
accidents recognise that human variability is a force to harness in averting
errors, but they work hard to focus that variability and are constantly
preoccupied with the possibility of failure
Ugh, don’t remind me of excel messing up your stuff involving dates, and my bane, the leading 0 disappearance. That has messed me up so much with the DMT and revision numbers that have a leading 0.
We’re saying the same thing. Hiring a father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate instead of prioritizing appropriate skills is a systemic problem. It’s a common in certain other specific skills too. For example, “good with money, they’ll figure it out” is practically a plague in bookkeeping!
When pasting: Ctrl-Alt-V, select “text”. And disable automatic type detection in Excel if you haven’t already.
That first one doesn’t help too much because I tend to forget to do that. If I remember I normally just change the columns I need from generic to text and go that way, though it seems your method is more straightforward.
Definitely will look into the automatic type detection thing. I never tried to find a better solution because at the time I just want to get done with it and move and then forget about it later. Until the next time it happens…
Understood that Microsoft Fabric is not an Epicor product.
rather than delayed snapshots.
agree with 
y way to store data.