Leadec : Automation and scaling of sales reporting using Power BI and Salesforce

Leadec, headquartered in Stuttgart with more than 23,000 employees, is the global leading service specialist for the entire lifecycle of factories and their supporting infrastructure. In addition to a CRMbased operational sales reporting, the Sales Excellence department provides an extensive sales management reporting suite covering global sales activities (including pipeline management, planactual comparisons, strategic analyses, and statistical forecasts). Growing content requirements and a steadily expanding group of stakeholders had increased the complexity of the process: the previous report creation workflow – involving data downloads from CRM and finance systems, Excel calculations, and PowerPoint – required significant capacity. 

The exponential growth in data volumes, along with the corresponding manual data linkages and calculation steps, consumed additional resources. As a result, scaling the steering model and continuously evolving reporting capabilities became increasingly difficult. Together with Horváth, Leadec therefore set out to automate the sales reporting process. 

By using the Salesforce connector, the Salesforce CRM system was successfully integrated into the Power BI data model to establish a central data foundation. Additional information – such as financial data, organizational structures, and security requirements – was incorporated via Excel files. A commenting function was also implemented, storing comments on SharePoint. Entries can be made across several dimensions, including business unit, date, and KPIs. Salesforce data at the opportunity level was transformed in such a way that it can be evaluated monthly and used for revenue calculations. 

The new reporting platform significantly reduced the effort required for report creation while greatly improving data availability. It now enables analyses from multiple perspectives and reaches a broader user base – from regional units to business units and profit centers. The solution not only allows more frequent updates but also offers intuitive visualizations tailored specifically to management’s needs. Additionally, the platform enables deeper, interactive data analysis through sliceanddice functionality and commenting features.

This has substantially improved the sales performance analytics capabilities. 

Additional components – such as a multidimensional authorization system, a sophisticated FX (foreign exchange) management setup, and a mobile app – complement the new reporting platform.