Microsoft Dynamics NAV Integration with Power BI

As a part of my series of articles on Microsoft Dynamics NAV, I am sharing you my next article on “How to connect Microsoft Dynamics NAV with Power BI”

Power BI is a Business Intelligence application from Microsoft that can be easily integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV (ERP). Power BI visualizations can be embedded directly into Dynamics NAV Role-Center Page/Dashboard to give detailed insights into your data and help you make more informed decisions. Microsoft Power BI also comes as a standalone application where you can customize dashboards and reports and also publish/synchronize it to NAV instance to give an end-to-end view of your business from one application.

Microsoft Power BI retrieves the data from multiple data sources like Excel, Text/CSV, XML, JSON, SQL Server Database, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 and many more for presenting data in multiple visualizations.

Image 1 Data Source for Power BI

For fetching the data from any of the data sources and especially in the case of database source one should have access/permission to the specific table where the data is retrieved from.

Next, we look at steps for Microsoft Dynamics NAV integration with Power BI:

Step-1: Click on Apps in Navigation Pane and select Get Apps. Search for a suitable application. 

Image 2 Power BI Apps

Step-2: When prompted, enter your Microsoft Dynamics NAV OData  URL in the following manner.

https//instance.navserver.com:7048/DynamicsNAV90_Instance1/OData/Company('CRONUS%20International%20Ltd.')

  Ø  "instance.navserver.com" with your NAV Server name

  Ø  "DynamicsNAV90_Instance1" with your NAV Server Instance name

  Ø  "Company('CRONUS%20International%20Ltd.')" with your NAV Company name

  Ø  Select Basic and enter your Microsoft Dynamics NAV credentials. Only Basic (Username and Password) authentication is currently supported.

Image 3 Connection of Power BI with M.S.Dynamics NAV

Step-3: Power BI will retrieve the data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV and we can use this data to create ready to use BI Reports and Dashboards.

Retrieving data Power BI may take a few minutes. Keep patience 

Step-4: To view the created dashboard and reports, Go to My Workspace and click on Dashboard to visualize the NAV data.

For further information on how to create this Power BI Dashboard & reports, you can get in touch with me. Also, I will soon publish another article on “How to design Power BI Dashboard & reports”

PS: This article is based on my best knowledge of the Dynamics NAV and Power BI, any suggestions/feedback are welcome!

Thanks!
Jaymesh Shah