Released in 2023, Microsoft Fabric has revolutionized data warehousing and reporting in several organizations. Many educational institutions have also migrated to or are planning to migrate to Microsoft Fabric. The scalable solution improves the efficiency of data collection and analysis for preparing forecasting and reporting. Our Fabric blog post series presents the features, benefits and pricing of the platform.
Why are educational institutions so interested in Fabric? I decided to interview our architect, Jani Laitala, who has worked on several projects with educational institutions that have moved to Fabric. Here is a brief summary of Jani’s answers regarding the benefits of Fabric for educational institutions.
Why the interest in Fabric?
It has never been easier to deploy a data platform that has all the components you need to collect data for Power BI reporting or deploy artificial intelligence. You get access to everything for a single monthly payment. Fabric scales well to users’ needs, and you can get started for as little as a few hundred euros per month.
Why is Fabric especially useful for educational institutions?
Several educational institutions are already accustomed to using Power BI for reporting, but retrieving and combining data from multiple sources, such as Peppi, SAP, Repotronic, etc., as well as open sources, such as Statistics Finland, Arvo, and Vipunen, can be challenging. Fabric provides versatile functions for retrieving data from various sources. After automated processing (merging, cleansing and further processing), the data is ready for visualization with the included Power BI. Read more about why a data warehouse is such an important part of knowledge management.Specific to education is the monitoring and analysis of students and the reporting of teacher work schedules.
Traditional data warehousing solutions have only supported the management of quantifiable data, but Fabric’s Lakehouse component allows unstructured data to be collected and stored in the same place so that it can be analyzed by anyone who needs it.
What kind of reporting do educational institutions need?
In addition to traditional income statements and common financial reporting metrics, educational institutions need to monitor investment, project, and RDI activities, among others. In HR reporting, educational institutions are interested in forecasting staffing, salary costs, skills, employee retention, absences, internationality, and retirement status in relation to the various dimensions.
Specific to education is the monitoring and analysis of students and the reporting of teacher work schedules. Machine learning can be used, for example, to create refined forecasts and cause-and-effect relationships regarding student graduation. Advanced knowledge management supports high-quality education, which means that students graduate on time. It it is also important to use open data to make comparisons with other educational institutions.
Fabric acts as an integration platform, facilitating regulatory reporting, for example. This eliminates time spent searching for data and performing manual entry, as data can be automatically collected, validated, and shared in the right format.
How to get started with a Fabric project?
Fabric deployment can be simplified by starting with a small area, such as education tracking or HR reporting. This allows you to try out Fabric without taking any risks, and you can quickly realize the benefits. After the initial phase, you can continue to deploy Fabric, one subset of tasks at a time.
If you don’t know exactly where to start deploying Fabric, you can also start with a definition project where you define the reports and metrics together in a workshop facilitated by Pinja. The purpose of the definition project is to create a realistic reporting package that is easy to implement piece by piece, based on a roadmap created during the definition.
We at Pinja are constantly following the news and updates from Microsoft regarding Fabric and working out how we can best help our clients. If you would like to learn more about Fabric, please contact us for a more in-depth discussion.
Read more
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 1: From the past to the present
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 2: Technology
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 3: Performance
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 4: Licenses
A summary on why a data warehouse is such an important part of knowledge management
Knowledge management and business intelligence at Pinja
Microsoft Fabric
