Bringing Power BI to Microsoft Dynamics AX: A working example

When Microsoft Dynamics AX MVP Murray Fife was challenged recently to develop a new visualizations based on geography, population density, and highly specific business rules to help a company support its strategic planning, the self described "tinkerer" took the opportunity to put the various components of Microsoft's Power BI suite to work with Dynamics AX.

In a new blog post, Fife, also the author of the Extending Dynamics AX Cookbook, breaks down how the various tools of Power BI - Power Query, PowerPivot, Power View and Power Map (a.k.a. GeoFlow, now open available as a preview) - can be used together.  Power BI was first introduced publicly around WPC 2013. Here's the demo from the opening day.

Fife's challenge was the following:

"...to find a way for one of our customers to view how many customers they have by zip code, and compare it to the population within the area so that they can determine if they should accept new customer requests. Their customers are actually sales people, and they did not want to have more than one customer per 10000 people within the local zip code or surrounding area."

You can read the blog post for all the details, but the process illustrates how to use elements of the various Power BI tools: pulling in external data with Power Query; tying together the AX data with the external data via PowerPivot; mapping, filtering, and drilling down into the data with Power View; and then visualizing it ...