Microsoft Finance delivers insights over 60% faster with Microsoft Fabric

The Finance Data and Experiences (FD&E) team at Microsoft handles immense volumes of Microsoft Azure consumed revenue data, compiling reports that provide key insights to leaders across the organization. Processing billions of rows of data was a slow and complex task, requiring up to eight hours to generate reports. The weekly Azure consumed revenue report is delivered to Microsoft Executive Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, and if either leader were to identify an irregularity and request a granular view of the data, generating the corresponding insights could take a further eight hours.

Swift, highly secure access to data

The FD&E team began looking for a faster, simpler, and more scalable way to unify its data and analytics platform. “We made speed to data our North Star,” says Ramakrishna Burugupalli, Engineering Lead for Commercial Finance Data & Experiences at Microsoft. “If we could give our stakeholders that, especially alongside increased self-service access to finance data, we’d be very happy.”

The team found the solution in Microsoft Fabric, a cloud-native, AI-powered platform that streamlines data ingestion, transformation, and visualization. Fabric uses Microsoft OneLake, a data lake solution that organizes data in a central location for quick and easy discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance. With Fabric, the FD&E team can use notebooks to implement business logic and prepare the data for analysis, along with Microsoft Power BI dashboards to create interactive and detailed reports. “With Fabric, we not only have faster data access through its semantic data model, we can also better design and defend our data pipelines and notebooks because they’re housed in a single, packaged cloud platform,” explains Burugupalli.

The benefits of Fabric are significant and tangible. The FD&E team has reduced back-end processing time by two-thirds, delivering reports to executives five hours faster than before. “As soon as we get data from any of our sources, we’ll quickly process and publish it to the teams that need it to make their most important business decisions,” says Burugupalli. “With Fabric, we’ve gained the speed to data we were hoping for, we’ve expanded data access, and we’ve even reduced the cost of generating that data by 50%.”

The faster processing times have also benefited the team’s bug-fixing efforts. After a bug is found and patched out of the code, results of test runs are generated up to six hours faster. Moreover, the FD&E team has increased data access and security by creating a new group that grants permissions to stakeholders from across Microsoft, not just Finance. And the team plans to future-proof its Fabric innovations across 50 additional solutions in the coming months.

Speeding and automating business-critical data delivery

“Speed to data is the power of Microsoft Fabric,” says Yijia Miao, Senior Technical Program Manager for Commercial Finance Data & Experiences at Microsoft. “It’s a unified, AI-powered analytics platform in the cloud that allows you to publish your data so much faster than more fragmented solutions can hope to accomplish.” Miaoalso notes that, because Fabric is a cloud-native solution, it’s primed to take advantage of the continuing developments in generative AI. “It’s a one-stop shop for cloud solutions, and we’re already looking at putting it together with Microsoft Copilot,” she says. “The potential for us to derive an even broader set of insights from this data in the immediate future is incredible.”