How to connect POWER BI with SAP Business One Software?

[RahimZulfiqar]

How to connect POWER BI with SAP Business One Software?

[creeves1]

Hi all, forgive my 7-year tardiness, but let me offer what I can.

Connecting Power BI to a SQL instance of SAP B1 is as straightforward as calerof has explained. For HANA, I'd suggest using HDBODBC and avoiding the Service Layer. HDBODBC is what Azure Data Factory uses, to put Microsoft's stamp of authority on that approach.

Having said that, I suspect you'll quickly find connectivity isn't the real challenge. Where we see customers get stuck is:

No star schema

Raw SAP B1 objects (OINV, OITM, OCRD, etc.) perform terribly in Power BI. Microsoft says a star schema is essentially required for anything serious, and that’s understating it. Building production-ready transforms is a nightmare, and denormalization errors create duplicates that aren’t acceptable in financial data.

Combining company databases

You'll likely already be familiar that SAP B1 stores data across multiple company databases. Hundreds of manual union steps quickly become an ongoing nightmare.

Managing user-defined fields (UDFs)
UDFs require per-row lookups, further confounding your data model with memory-heavy M operations.

If you have simple requirements for a single-company instance and few UDFs, go for it. Otherwise I strongly suggest you put a data warehouse in between SAP B1 and Power BI. Transform the SAP B1 data to a star schema in a PK-enforced database, let an ETL tool automatically merge company tables, and leverage the database for performant UDF lookups.

Full disclosure: I’m the CEO of Zap, and we built our product specifically for this SAP B1 → warehouse → Power BI integration (via XMLA). I’m not aware of any other product built specifically to this end with SAP B1 in mind. You can check out how it works here: https://www.zapbi.com/platform-pages/power-bi-integration-sap-b1

Cheers,

Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I come across this post and am wondering if you have found a solution to this use case? If yes, would you mind to share some hints?

My understanding is that Power BI is like Excel as a reporting tool to B1. You can connect Power BI to the SQL/HANA database and do more modeling once the data is loaded to Power BI. But I am not aware of any pre-defined Power BI Content Packs by Microsoft that one can just plug-and-play. You may have to look at some 3rd party add-ons, if there is, please do share the info; or you may need to build your own model.

Cheers,

Jimmy 

[calerof]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I used the SQL Server data source in Power BI. 

The following link may help you. Tutorial: Connect to on-premises data in SQL Server

Cheers and good luck,

Fernando

[calerof]

Did I answer your question? Please mark it as answered.

Thank you

[Anonymous]

Hi Fernando,

Thank you for sharing.

I have some reports and dashboards using Excel pivot tables which retrieve data from B1 using SQL queries and ODBC connections (for budgeting, sales, and warehouse operations). I find Power BI a good option to replace these Excel files for key users considering the mobility benefits Power BI offers.

For my curiosity, how do you find this PBI and B1 combined solution so far for you? And if you don't mind, would you please share if you are from a B1/Power BI partner's or an end cusotmer's perspective?

Thank you,

Jimmy

[calerof]

Hi Jimmy,

I'm an independent BI consultant.

It's difficult at the beginning, but after struggling a bit with the tables the rest goes in a more decent way.

If I could be of any help please let me know.

Kind regards,

Fernando

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi @RahimZulfiqar,

I would suggest you try out the SAP connectors. If you have the permission to connect to the database directly, you also can give it a try.

Best Regards,

Dale

[calerof]

Hello Dale @v-jiascu-msft,

You are not replying to the question to connect to SAP Busines One. Basically SAP Business One runs with a Microsoft SQL database.

Could you please advise?

Thank you and regards,

Fernando

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi Fernando,

As we can see from the Power BI Desktop, there isn't a connector like "SAP business one". So my suggestion is connecting to the database directly. You also can try other connectors that the SAP Business One can provide. For example, sapbusinessone/odata/.

Please note: I'm not a professional of SAP. I can only provide some suggestions.

Best Regards,
Dale