Case Study 2 - Contoso Ltd Overview Existing Environment Contoso, Ltd. is a manufacturing company that produces outdoor equipment Contoso has quarterly board meetings for which financial analysts manually prepare Microsoft Excel reports, including profit and loss statements for each of the company's four business units, a company balance sheet, and net income projections for the next quarter. Data and Sources Data for the reports comes from three sources. Detailed revenue, cost and expense data comes from an Azure SQL database. Summary balance sheet data comes from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The balance sheet data is not related to the profit and loss results, other than they both relate to dates. Monthly revenue and expense projections for the next quarter come from a Microsoft SharePoint Online list. Quarterly projections relate to the profit and loss results by using the following shared dimensions: date, business unit, department, and product category. Net Income Projection Data Net income projection data is stored in a SharePoint Online list named Projections in the format shown in the following table. Revenue projections are set at the monthly level and summed to show projections for the quarter. Balance Sheet Data The balance sheet data is imported with final balances for each account per month in the format shown in the following table. There is always a row for each account for each month in the balance sheet data. Dynamics 365 Business Central Data Business Central contains a product catalog that shows how products roll up to product categories, which roll up to business units. Revenue data is provided at the date and product level. Expense data is provided at the date and department level. Business Issues Historically, it has taken two analysts a week to prepare the reports for the quarterly board meetings. Also, there is usually at least one issue each quarter where a value in a report is wrong because of a bad cell reference in an Excel formula. On occasion, there are conflicting results in the reports because the products and departments that roll up to each business unit are not defined consistently. Planned Changes Contoso plans to automate and standardize the quarterly reporting process by using Microsoft Power Bl. The company wants to how long it takes to populate reports to less than two days. The company wants to create common logic for business units, products, and departments to be used across all reports, including, but not limited, to the quarterly reporting for the board. Technical Requirements Contoso wants the reports and datasets refreshed with minimal manual effort The company wants to provide a single package of reports to the board that contains custom navigation and links to supplementary information. Maintenance, including manually updating data and access, must be minimized as much as possible. Security Requirements The reports must be made available to the board from powerbi.com. A mail-enabled security group will be used to share information with the board. The analysts responsible for each business unit must see all the data the board sees, except the profit and loss data, which must be restricted to only their business unit's data. The analysts must be able to build new reports from the dataset that contains the profit and loss data, but any reports that the analysts build must not be included in the quarterly reports for the board. The analysts must not be able to share the quarterly reports with anyone. Report Requirements You plan to relate the balance sheet to a standard date table in Power Bl in a many-to-one relationship based on the last day of the month. At least one of the balance sheet reports in the quarterly reporting package must show the ending balances for the quarter, as well as for the previous quarter. Projections must contain a column named RevenueProjection that contains the revenue projection amounts. A relationship must be created from Projections to a table named Date that contains the columns shown in the following table. The relationships between products and departments to business units must be consistent across all reports. The board must be able to get the following information from the quarterly reports:

Revenue trends over time

Ending balances for each account

A comparison of expenses versus projections by quarter

Changes in long-term liabilities from the previous quarter

A comparison of quarterly revenue versus the same quarter during the

prior year You need to recommend a strategy to consistently define the business unit, department, and product category data and make the data usable across reports. What should you recommend?

Question

Case Study 2 - Contoso Ltd Overview Existing Environment Contoso, Ltd. is a manufacturing company that produces outdoor equipment Contoso has quarterly board meetings for which financial analysts manually prepare Microsoft Excel reports, including profit and loss statements for each of the company's four business units, a company balance sheet, and net income projections for the next quarter. Data and Sources Data for the reports comes from three sources. Detailed revenue, cost and expense data comes from an Azure SQL database. Summary balance sheet data comes from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The balance sheet data is not related to the profit and loss results, other than they both relate to dates. Monthly revenue and expense projections for the next quarter come from a Microsoft SharePoint Online list. Quarterly projections relate to the profit and loss results by using the following shared dimensions: date, business unit, department, and product category. Net Income Projection Data Net income projection data is stored in a SharePoint Online list named Projections in the format shown in the following table. Revenue projections are set at the monthly level and summed to show projections for the quarter. Balance Sheet Data The balance sheet data is imported with final balances for each account per month in the format shown in the following table. There is always a row for each account for each month in the balance sheet data. Dynamics 365 Business Central Data Business Central contains a product catalog that shows how products roll up to product categories, which roll up to business units. Revenue data is provided at the date and product level. Expense data is provided at the date and department level. Business Issues Historically, it has taken two analysts a week to prepare the reports for the quarterly board meetings. Also, there is usually at least one issue each quarter where a value in a report is wrong because of a bad cell reference in an Excel formula. On occasion, there are conflicting results in the reports because the products and departments that roll up to each business unit are not defined consistently. Planned Changes Contoso plans to automate and standardize the quarterly reporting process by using Microsoft Power Bl. The company wants to how long it takes to populate reports to less than two days. The company wants to create common logic for business units, products, and departments to be used across all reports, including, but not limited, to the quarterly reporting for the board. Technical Requirements Contoso wants the reports and datasets refreshed with minimal manual effort The company wants to provide a single package of reports to the board that contains custom navigation and links to supplementary information. Maintenance, including manually updating data and access, must be minimized as much as possible. Security Requirements The reports must be made available to the board from powerbi.com. A mail-enabled security group will be used to share information with the board. The analysts responsible for each business unit must see all the data the board sees, except the profit and loss data, which must be restricted to only their business unit's data. The analysts must be able to build new reports from the dataset that contains the profit and loss data, but any reports that the analysts build must not be included in the quarterly reports for the board. The analysts must not be able to share the quarterly reports with anyone. Report Requirements You plan to relate the balance sheet to a standard date table in Power Bl in a many-to-one relationship based on the last day of the month. At least one of the balance sheet reports in the quarterly reporting package must show the ending balances for the quarter, as well as for the previous quarter. Projections must contain a column named RevenueProjection that contains the revenue projection amounts. A relationship must be created from Projections to a table named Date that contains the columns shown in the following table. The relationships between products and departments to business units must be consistent across all reports. The board must be able to get the following information from the quarterly reports:

Revenue trends over time
Ending balances for each account
A comparison of expenses versus projections by quarter
Changes in long-term liabilities from the previous quarter
A comparison of quarterly revenue versus the same quarter during the

prior year You need to recommend a strategy to consistently define the business unit, department, and product category data and make the data usable across reports. What should you recommend?

Accepted Answer

B. Create dataflows for the standardized data and make the dataflows available for use in all Dataflows allow for centralized data preparation and transformation, making standardized data entities available for consumption by multiple datasets across different workspaces, which promotes reusability and consistency across reports.

Answer

A. Create a shared dataset for each standardized entity. Shared datasets are for reusing modeled data, not for centralizing the data preparation and transformation logic needed to standardize data from various sources.

Answer

C. For every report, create and use a single shared dataset that contains the standardized data. Creating a single shared dataset for every report is less efficient than using dataflows to provide standardized entities that multiple datasets can consume, avoiding redundant preparation.

Answer

D. For the three entities, create exports of the data from the Power Bl model to Excel and store the Exporting data to Excel and storing it is a manual, non-scalable, and non-automated process that contradicts the goal of efficient data standardization for Power BI reports.

Case Study 2 - Contoso Ltd Overview Existing Environment Contoso, Ltd. is a manufacturing company that produces outdoor equipment Contoso has quarterly board meetings for which financial analysts…

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