Stop sending users to another tab: embedding Power BI inside F&O

Here's a small frustration that turned out to matter more than I expected. We had gorgeous Power BI reports — and almost nobody looked at them. Why? Because they lived in a different tab, behind a different login, away from the screen where people actually did their work. The day we pulled those visuals into F&O itself, usage shot up. Same reports. Different home. Turns out "out of sight, out of mind" is very real in ERP land.

So if you've got dashboards gathering dust, here's what I've learned about bringing them home.

The good news: the service is already there

If you're on a cloud-hosted multibox deployment, the Power BI Embedded service is deployed and configured for you automatically. New deployments come bundled with it. That removed the biggest excuse I used to hear — "we'd need to set up infrastructure first." You mostly don't.

Think in workspaces, not just reports

The thing that changed how I design: you can drop a Power BI-driven overview page right onto a workspace. Workspaces are already where users land to get a bird's-eye view — count tiles, KPIs, quick links. Adding live visuals there means the insight shows up exactly where the decision happens, not three clicks away. You can also wire menu items to specific reports and surface them as links inside the workspace.

You're still a developer here, not just a clicker

This is the part I genuinely enjoy: you use the familiar F&O programming concepts. Associate menu items with Power BI reports, embed them in workspaces, and — this is the important bit — apply role-based and task-based security to those menu items. The same security model you already trust governs who sees what. No bolt-on permissions to babysit.

Where the data comes from

For the heavier, near-real-time reports, Entity store is the operational data store built specifically for this. Model your reports in Power BI Desktop against it and you get high-volume analytics without hammering the transactional tables.

The takeaway

Great analytics that nobody opens aren't great analytics. Embedding Power BI into F&O isn't really about charts — it's about removing the distance between the number and the person who needs to act on it. Put the insight where the work already happens, secure it with the model you already use, and watch adoption take care of itself.