I recently got to present with Shawn Sissenwein at Community Summit North America 2023, where we talked about how to use Power BI for better warehouse reporting in Business Central during our session “Build KPI Reports for Your Warehouse with Power BI and Business Central.” We started by realizing we needed more APIs to get the right data. But we were surprised by how few APIs there were, especially for specific warehouse tasks when Directed Put-Away and Pick is turned on for a location. This led us to create some new APIs based on the existing ones and some brand-new APIs.
What We Looked At: Warehouse KPIs
In my next few posts, I’ll explain the tables and APIs we used and the kind of information they give us. We first decided on some key performance indicators (KPIs) we wanted to report on. Here they are:
1. User-Centric KPIs
- Receipts, Put-Aways, Shipments, and Picks per user
- Quantitative measures for the above metrics
2. Location-Based KPIs
- Purchase Orders Received and Sales Orders Shipped
- Item Adjustments by reason code
- Bin Replenishments
3. General Warehouse KPIs
- Vendor Score Card (including Lead Time, Over Shipments, and Returns)
- Cycle Counts (by user, frequency of item counting, adjustments by item code)
Next, we picked the best tables for this information. The “Warehouse Activity Header” and “Line” tables were great because they show a lot of details about ongoing warehouse activities like “Picks” and “Putaways.”
The following are the fields we included in the API from each table:
- Header: Type, Assigned User ID, Assignment Date and Time, External Document Numbers, Expected Receipt Date, Ship Date
- Lines: Item and Source Number, Location Code, Item Code, Description, Unit of Measure, Quantities (Handled, Outstanding, To Handle, Over Receipt), Bin Code, Zone Code, Over Receipt Code, and Destination Code
Adding these details to the APIs lets us report on different activities, filter them by place or item, and see how often we get more items than we ordered.
I’ll end with a real report example showing daily transactions based on this data.
This is just the start. I’ll be sharing more about how we used Power BI to make warehouse reporting in Business Central better. Keep an eye out for future posts on the topic!
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