Automisation - Mail & Feedback

[BackerGoertz]

Hi all,

I want to use Power BI as a steering program for our company.

We use different KPIs over more than 200 branches why it is very important for us to use tolerance levels. For example a branchs revenue decreased for more than 20%. After this signal the manager who is in charge of this branch has to do very specific actions.

This signal and the specific actions can be visualied via measure on a dashboard or a report but is it possible to send an E-Mail with this informations to the manager? I tried the opportunities with power automate but i couldn't find a good solution. 

Furthermore it must be possible for the manager to check off the action points. If these action points are not checked off in a defined timeline this topic would escalate to the senior manager.

[BackerGoertz]

Thx for the quick answer!

Do you know a good way to solve the 2. problem "...check off the action items for the specific signal"? Withouth that we cannot provide a dashboard for the senior management team to control and steer the escalations.

[christinepayton]

Yeah, there's a lot of ways to handle that. It will take some work, but what you probably want is the Power Automate flow, and as part of the flow have it create some "task" items (just list items, unless you want a classic task list - SharePoint create item action, one for each thing you want them to do) in a SharePoint list and email the manager. You'd have a status or yes/no column on those items that the manager can change when the task is complete. 

There's a separate Power Automate flow you can create (automated cloud flow, not scheduled) that triggers on field changes that could perform actions when the manager has completed all three tasks. You'd probably want some sort of ID reference to which "event" these are tied to so that you can isolate them and check if they're all complete or not when it runs. You want the "get changes" in SharePoint actions for this - there's some tutorials in YouTube/the web on how to use them. This isn't a super beginner-friendly flow to start with though, I can say that. 

Alternately if you want to keep it more simple you could use the Approvals actions in Power Automate and just have them click the button in the approval email when everything is done, if you don't need a paper trail of when each task was completed - it would be a lot simpler to set up. 

[christinepayton]

Yes, the easiest way to handle alerts is to use dashboard tiles. You'd create a card visual in your report with the measure/filter you want to alert on (in your case revenue decrease amount over some time period), pin it to a dashboard, then go to the dashboard and set the alert there. You don't have to use the dashboard as a visual thing people look at, this is just to get the alert to trigger. 

Alternately, you can use "query a Power BI dataset" in Power Automate to do the same thing - this is more configurable, you can set the email to look and include exactly what you want, etc. You would run this one on a schedule and have it run the query on some cadence and have an if-condition step that checks the query result to see if it's greater than a value before sending the email.

The trick with using Power Automate for alerts is you need to record somewhere as part of the flow when it sends the email, and then use that as part of the notification logic so that you don't spam people (e.g. you need it to run every day to check the value, but you may not want it triggering every day while the condition is true). I did a tutorial on using this action here - the use case isn't the same, but it gives you an idea how to do the query/email actions: https://youtu.be/5-0KH0IiDjU?si=dQCCckYkAV6IbvNa