Connect R&D metrics from Power BI to strategy in Cascade

Bring your research and development (R&D) metrics closer to your strategy to help you drive better results with the R&D projects, and achieve new dimensions of your products and services with innovations.

Integrate Power BI with Cascade to bring visibility on your key metrics like project progress, on-time completion rate, R&D costs, R&D budget, time to market, and so on. With this integration, you can automatically update your measures in Cascade, and report accurate progress on your strategic objectives.

This connection is enabled through Power Automate. Eliminate the need to go back and forth between Cascade and your Power BI scorecards. Keep your data up-to-date, accurate, and right where you need it. Save time spent on reporting and monitoring your strategy.

Being that one source of truth with centralized access to all company data, Cascade provides the ability to transform statistical information into actionable insights and a compelling narrative with effective data storytelling.

Prerequisites

Before you establish the connection, it is important that these prerequisites are met:

Cascade:

• An ‘Essentials or Enterprise+’ tier account in Cascade to access Power Automate connections.
• A 'Measure' that is associated with your 'Objective' in the plan that you created in Cascade, and want to link to your goal in Power BI.
• The tracking type of the measure is set as Power Automate, with the initial and target values defined.

Power Automate:

• Microsoft 365 or Dynamics 365 license with Power Automate capabilities. Also this works best with the online version of Power BI.

Power BI:

• A Power BI account.
• A BI goal that has the measure's progress value (that needs to be updated in Cascade).

Integrate Power BI with Cascade:

Step 1: Connect Power Automate with Cascade

It is important to establish a connection between Power Automate and Cascade to start integrating the measures. You can then use the same connection to integrate other apps to Cascade via Power Automate.

1. From the measure’s sidebar, under the Tracking section, select Microsoft Power Automate.
2. Enter the initial and target values for the measure to track progress. If you wish to customize the tracking option, toggle the Maintain button to define target and critical limits.
3. Click Save.

When you select Power Automate from the measure's tracking section, a modal pop-up redirects you to Power Automate. You'll now see the Power Automate's Flow interface.

Alternatively, you can also establish a connection from Power Automate.

1. Log in to your Power Automate account.
2. Click Connectors, or Data > Connections > + New connection, and search for Cascade Strategy New.
3. Enter your Cascade credentials to establish the connection.

See How to Use Power Automate with Cascade for more information.

Step 2: Sync the progress of measures in Power BI to the relevant measures in Cascade

Now, to sync the progress made in a Power BI scorecard to a measure in Cascade, you’ll need to get those details in the Power Automate interface.

1. Set up the trigger:

1. Click + Create or My Flows from the left navigation pane to either create a flow from scratch or to use a pre-made flow.
2. Search for Power BI, and choose a relevant trigger. The value obtained from this trigger must be mapped to the measure value in Cascade later.
3. Select the BI workspace, the scorecard and goal details in which the measure resides.

To understand the different triggers from Power BI, and for more help with the Power BI-Power Automate workflows, please refer here in the Power Automate Help Center.

2. Update measure in Cascade:

1. Now, select Cascade Strategy New to update progress of the measure in Cascade.
2. Select the Cascade workspace, plan, and measure. 
3. Choose the Measure value from the triggered values obtained from the Power BI event.
4. Click Save.

Refer Integrate Power BI with Cascade article for detailed information on this integration. In the article, you'll see how you can use a tailor-made template for the most common trigger used with Power BI integration.

You've now successfully established the trigger and action. Now, with ease and no efforts from you, your values will get updated automatically in Cascade, every time the relevant event is triggered in Power BI.

Some tips:

• You can schedule a flow, and then run a query to fetch a dataset from Power BI to decide on what values you need to bring into Cascade.
• You can add your own custom unit if you do not find the unit of your choice. Just enter the text or symbol, and it’ll prompt you to add it to the list.
• Choose the relevant "maintain" options under the Target type dropdown when you need to customize the health of your measure.

Benefits

This integration provides you with all the elements for an effective “data storytelling”.

• Bring precise and up-to-date “data”: Track the progress precisely and on time with automatic sync between the Power BI goals and the measures in Cascade.
• Build engaging “visuals”: Visualize the progress with the various measure widgets and custom charts in the dashboards.
• Create compelling “narratives”: Build reports to make guided decisions based on the progress made in these measures and thereby the objectives in the plans.

FAQs

My Power Automate flow failed. How should I proceed?

Click My Flows, and choose the flow that you're working on. Now, click on the flow that failed, and from the Error details displayed on the right sidebar, analyze it or report to us to fix it.

There is a connection error with Power Automate.

From the left navigation pane, click Data > Connections, and delete the connection that you used. Now, when you start with the flow, it'll establish a new connection. At any point in time, you can click the three dots against the action title, and click +Add new connection.