Overview
This post walks through building a Power BI dashboard connected to Business Central for life sciences businesses. It covers which KPIs to prioritise and how Microsoft Copilot fits alongside your dashboard. You’ll also find practical design tips and where Tecvia can help.
If you’re running reports by exporting data to Excel, waiting for month-end summaries, or pulling figures from different systems, you’re working harder than you need to.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central connects directly to Power BI and Microsoft Copilot. That means the data already in your ERP can feed a live dashboard covering financials, warehouse, production, and purchasing. You can query it in plain English, and you don’t need to wait for someone to build a report.
Here’s how to approach it.
Start With The Decisions You Need To Make
Before you build anything, be clear on who the dashboard is for and what they need to act on. For a life sciences business, that usually means two audiences.
Operations teams need visibility on batch and lot status across production, stock levels, and expiry dates. They also need order fulfilment rates, delivery performance, and quality holds or rejections.
Finance teams need visibility on revenue and gross margin by product or customer, drawn from your financial management data. They also track purchase costs, supplier performance, cash flow, and budget versus actual across departments.
Build separate dashboards for each audience. A single screen trying to serve both usually ends up serving neither well.
Connect Business Central To Power BI
Business Central has a built-in Power BI integration, so you don’t need a third-party connector or a data warehouse to get started.
From within Business Central, you can publish data to Power BI using built-in reports, or by connecting Power BI Desktop directly to your environment using the OData feed. Microsoft also provides a library of pre-built content packs covering finance, sales, purchasing, and inventory, all part of the wider feature set available out of the box.
For life sciences businesses specifically, layering in batch traceability data, quality control results, and supplier audit records makes the integration particularly useful. You’re not just tracking revenue. You’re tracking the operational data that directly affects compliance and product quality.
The KPIs Worth Building First
Rather than trying to visualise everything at once, pick the five or six numbers that get asked about most often in your business.
For life sciences, these typically include the batch pass or fail rate, which links closely to the traceability data already in your system. On-time delivery rate and inventory days on hand matter too, because both affect customer trust.
Purchase price variance shows whether you’re paying what you planned for materials, a figure that draws directly on your purchasing data. Gross margin by product line and outstanding customer balances round out a solid starting set.
Get these right first. Once people are using the dashboard regularly, you can add more.
Where Microsoft Copilot Comes In
Power BI gives you the dashboards. Microsoft Copilot, built directly into Business Central, gives you the ability to ask questions about that data without building a report at all, extending the automation covered in our guide to features you’re already paying for.
Copilot uses natural language. You type a question, and it returns an answer pulled from your live ERP data, with no SQL and no pivot tables required.
For a life sciences business, that changes how quickly teams get answers. A finance manager can ask about gross margin on a product this quarter compared to last, while an operations lead can ask which batches are on quality hold. This mirrors the way automation now works in tools like the Sales Order Agent, where questions that once meant exporting a spreadsheet now return an answer in seconds.
Copilot For Financial Summaries
One practical use of Copilot in Business Central is automated financial summarisation. Instead of manually creating a month-end report, Copilot writes a summary of your financial position using your general ledger, accounts receivable, and budget data.
For life sciences businesses that report to investors, boards, or regulatory bodies, this saves real time. The summary won’t replace a professional financial review, but it gives finance leads a solid first draft to work from.
Copilot And Compliance
In a regulated environment, one of the harder things to stay on top of is whether your data is telling you something you need to act on. A batch on hold longer than expected, or a supplier whose quality metrics are drifting, can easily go unnoticed.
Copilot can surface these issues proactively when configured to do so, which matters for businesses working within GxP, GMP, or GDP frameworks. Rather than someone checking manually, the system flags anomalies and brings them forward, similar to the structured checks covered in our quality inspection guide. That kind of early visibility matters when non-compliance carries real consequences.
Power BI And Copilot: How They Work Together
Power BI and Copilot serve different purposes, although they work well alongside each other.
Power BI is best for structured, recurring reporting. You build the dashboard once, it refreshes automatically, and the same view is available to the whole team. This suits KPI tracking and trend analysis, the same principle behind good vendor management reporting.
Copilot is best for ad hoc questions, when someone needs a specific answer quickly and doesn’t want to navigate a dashboard to find it. Used together, they cover both ends of the reporting need.
Design For Clarity Not Completeness
A common mistake is cramming too much onto one screen. If someone has to search for the number they need, the dashboard isn’t doing its job.
A few principles work well here. Put the most important number at the top left, because that’s where the eye goes first. Use colour consistently, such as red for off-track and green for on-track, rather than for decoration.
Show trends, not just snapshots, because a number on its own only tells you where you are. Add filters for time period, product, and location so users can drill in without needing a new report.
Keep It Live
One of the main benefits of connecting Power BI to Business Central is that the data refreshes automatically. You set the refresh schedule, and the dashboard updates without anyone doing anything.
For most life sciences businesses, a daily refresh is enough. Businesses managing fast-moving stock or high-volume production can set it to refresh more frequently, with support from Tecvia if you need help fine-tuning it.
This matters because decisions made on stale data are often worse than no data at all.
Who Should Own It
Someone in your business needs to own the dashboard. That means keeping data clean in Business Central, updating visuals when KPIs change, and making sure new team members know how to use it.
This doesn’t have to be a dedicated analyst. In most small and mid-sized life sciences businesses, it sits with a finance manager or operations lead with admin access to Business Central and basic Power BI skills. If you’re not there yet, that’s something Tecvia can support as part of your implementation.
What This Means For Life Sciences Businesses Specifically
Life sciences businesses operate under more reporting pressure than most. Regulatory bodies want documentation, boards want performance data, and operations teams need real-time visibility to catch quality issues before they become compliance problems.
Relying on spreadsheets and manual exports to meet that demand creates risk, because data gets out of date and versions get mixed up. If stock visibility is part of your challenge too, our guide to managing obsolete and slow-moving stock covers related ground.
Business Central, Power BI, and Copilot replace scattered spreadsheets with a single, connected system. Any team member can ask a question and get an answer, without raising a ticket or waiting until month end. For a business where data accuracy has regulatory consequences, that’s a practical necessity rather than a nice-to-have.
Get Your Dashboard Built With Tecvia
A Power BI dashboard is only as useful as the setup behind it. Tecvia connects Business Central to Power BI and Copilot, then configures the KPIs that matter most to your life sciences business.
Get in touch for a free consultation, or ask us for a demo of what a live dashboard looks like for your data. Our support team stays involved after go-live, so your dashboard keeps working as your KPIs evolve. Contact Tecvia to talk through your reporting needs.
FAQs
For anything not covered here, get in touch directly. We’re happy to answer questions specific to your business and your ERP requirements.
No. Business Central includes a built-in Power BI integration, so you can publish data using built-in reports or connect Power BI Desktop directly through the OData feed. A separate data warehouse isn’t required to get started.
Start with batch pass or fail rate, on-time delivery rate, and inventory days on hand. Purchase price variance, gross margin by product line, and outstanding customer balances are also worth building early, since these are the numbers most businesses ask about first.
Copilot lets users ask natural language questions and get an answer pulled from live Business Central data, without building a report. It works well alongside Power BI, because the dashboard handles recurring reporting while Copilot handles ad hoc questions.
You set the refresh schedule yourself. A daily refresh is enough for most life sciences businesses, although businesses with fast-moving stock or high-volume production can set it to refresh more frequently.
Someone needs to own it, which usually means keeping data clean in Business Central and updating visuals as KPIs change. This is often a finance manager or operations lead with basic Power BI skills rather than a dedicated analyst.
Yes. Copilot can be configured to flag anomalies proactively, such as a batch on hold longer than expected or a supplier with drifting quality metrics. This gives regulated businesses earlier visibility than manual checks alone.
