Energy
From Excel Chaos to Unified Financial Insight
Primary Area
Organizational Project Management (OPM)
Service Area
Financial Project Management & Accounting
Products Used
Azure, Power Platform
Roles Impacted
Portfolio Managers, Program Managers, Project Accountants, Financial Analysts
Impact Highlight
80 % reduction in manual consolidation tasks and error corrections
Opportunity
A global energy corporation recognised an opportunity to strengthen financial insight by replacing a fragmented consolidation process that relied on multi‑user Excel workbooks fed by SAP Analysis for Office plug‑ins. Version conflicts, broken links and manual PowerPoint assembly eroded data quality and delayed the month‑end close.
Disparate Excel files across business units caused version and access conflicts.
Consolidations depended on manual formulas and copy‑paste steps vulnerable to error.
Final reports were rebuilt in PowerPoint every cycle, extending the close by days.
Lack of audit trail and data lineage raised compliance and governance risks.
Solution
Our team formed a joint finance‑IT squad, redesigned consolidation processes and delivered a cloud‑native platform built on Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse, and Power BI. Legacy on‑prem SSIS packages were migrated into Fabric pipelines with change control through Azure DevOps.
People: Up‑skilled finance analysts through targeted DAX & Power Query training; established a data‑centric Center of Excellence.
Process: Introduced agile sprint rituals, automated validation checks and a release pipeline that promotes changes from dev to prod in under an hour.
Technology: Fabric Lakehouse for curated financial data, semantic models, Power BI for interactive reporting, Azure Data Factory for ETL, Azure DevOps for CI/CD; decommissioned Excel‑based macros.
Impact
The corporation now operates from a single, trusted financial model that refreshes hourly and renders interactive Power BI dashboards directly from Fabric. Automation eliminated roughly 80 % of manual effort and cut the monthly close from four days to one day, enabling finance to focus on analysis instead of data wrangling.
80 % reduction in manual consolidation tasks and error corrections.
Month‑end reporting cycle shortened from ~4 days to 1 day.
Hourly automated refreshes replaced ad‑hoc data pulls.
Re‑allocated analysts hours to scenario planning and variance analysis.
Improved auditability.