Our client is a healthcare technology company offering managed solutions for pharmaceutical enterprises. They provide interactive business intelligence dashboards and reports to their clients using Microsoft Power BI. Thousands of pharmaceutical sales representatives, managers, and administrators use these dashboards and reports on a daily basis to get business insights about meetings with hospitals and doctors that drive sales for millions of orders per day.

Our client reached out to Softcrylic to optimize the performance of its Power BI dashboards and reports. Softcrylic with its deep expertise in Power BI, Azure Cloud, and Load & Performance Testing helped the client fine-tune their Power BI dashboards. Softcrylic helped the client improve the performance of Power BI dashboards and implemented best practices for their team to scale their reporting solution in the future.

Our client faced severe performance issues with their business intelligence dashboards when the dashboards were accessed by their client’s sales managers using WIFI connection and sales representatives on the road with low bandwidth mobile connections such as 3G. The issues ranged from a slow load time of dashboards to incomplete rendering of data. The performance of the dashboards impacted the sales operations of their clients.

Softcrylic quickly formed a small team of PowerBI and Load/ Performance testing experts to help our client optimize reports, and direct data queries in Power BI to improve performance and reduce the page load time for end-users. The engagement was well planned with discovery, design, development, execution, analysis, and reporting phases. During the discovery phase, the performance objectives of the dashboards and reports such as no. of concurrent users, optimal response time, network connection speeds such as WIFI, 4G and 3G and user agents (desktop and mobile browsers) the dashboard and reports must support were identified and documented.

Softcrylic’s Performance Testing and Data Visualization teams conducted multiple load tests from different locations, network connection speeds, and user agents using Microsoft VSTS tool and Azure cloud to establish a baseline performance for the dashboards “as-is”. Load tests were conducted with and without data caching to measure the true performance of the dashboards under different load conditions. Multiple performance metrics were captured and analyzed to identify the performance bottlenecks and areas of improvement.

Our data visualization team optimized the dashboard performance by refactoring Data models, pipelines, transformations, and Power BI DAX logics. Every set optimization was load tested and performance metrics from the latest tests were compared with the baseline to make improvements until the performance objectives were met.