By: David Giraldo, Principal Fabric Analytics Consultant at Simple BI Last updated: Sep, 5, 2026 Business intelligence answers "what happened and what is happening now," using dashboards and reports built on
For a manufacturer running multiple ERPs with no dedicated data team, it has to work as a lightweight discipline, not a department.
A buyer's guide to Power BI consulting firms for manufacturing: the Manufacturing BI Partner Criteria, plus where Simple BI fits and where it doesn't.
Eliminate dashboard chaos with the Simple BI 3-Layer Consolidation Framework: governance, tiered reporting, and a 90-day decommission process.
A practical decision framework for manufacturing IT leads evaluating the Power BI to Microsoft Fabric migration, covering when to migrate, licensing costs, manufacturing-specific risks, and what Fabric actually unlocks for industrial analytics.
Learn how to build a quality control dashboard in Power BI for manufacturing – covering scrap rate, first-pass yield, COPQ, DAX measures, data model structure, and dashboard design for plant managers.
We wrote this article for manufacturing companies already invested in Azure and Power BI who need clear, opinionated guidance – not another “it depends.” We’ll look at how Microsoft Fabric and Databricks compare specifically in a factory context, where data comes from PLCs and historians as much as from ERP and Excel.
You need one good Fabric use case to start with. We’ll stay away from buzzwords and walk through exactly those kinds of scenarios: specific, manufacturing-focused ways to use Microsoft Fabric that help you run better plants – not just nicer slides.
If you’re choosing between Fabric Warehouse and Fabric Lakehouse, you’re not really choosing a storage format—you’re choosing the default way your team will build, transform, secure, and serve data.
Rather than rounding up generic “data influencers”, we’ve focused on hands-on Microsoft Fabric engineers – people who actually build lakehouses, warehouses, pipelines and governance frameworks on Fabric, and then share what they’ve learned.