Five industries worked hands on, so we arrive knowing where the gaps usually are.
All industries →Request a demoFour ERP platforms in house, and fifteen capability modules. The recommendation is never tied to a licence quota.
All solutions →Request a demoOne team from platform selection through to the reports on your desk.
All services →Request a demoGuides, how-tos, comparisons and a plain-English glossary, written by the consultants who deliver the projects. No form in front of any of it.
Nobody in UAE ERP publishes their tools or their pricing. We do both.
Free tools →Request a demoAn ERP and IT consultancy in Business Bay, Dubai, implementing Oracle, Microsoft, Odoo and SAP across the UAE and GCC.
Consultants in the UAE, technical team in South Asia. Cost stays sharp without cutting corners.
About QZ Infomatics →Request a demoYour business generates a lot of data.
Let's make it actually useful.
QZ Infomatics builds Power BI solutions and data platforms for UAE businesses. We connect all your data sources, model them into a coherent, trustworthy data layer, and surface the right insights to the right people in real time, in the tools they already use. Most of the work sits in the data model rather than the visuals — a well-modelled dataset makes every later report quick to build and easy to reconcile to your ERP.
The work nobody sees
Most businesses do not have a data shortage. They have five systems that each hold part of the answer and no agreed version of the truth between them.
A Power BI consultant spends far less time building charts than most people expect. The work is connecting your sources and modelling the data so that the same number means the same thing everywhere it appears.
The short, unglamorous, essential step. Agreeing what each metric means before anyone opens a visual is what makes the dashboards afterwards defensible in a management meeting.
Get that layer right and every dashboard afterwards is quick to build and reconciles to the ledger. Get it wrong and you have produced a faster way to argue about numbers.
Most reporting problems are not reporting problems. They are data model problems wearing a dashboard.
Definition
Business intelligence software pulls data from your ERP, CRM, spreadsheets and other systems into one place and presents it as dashboards and reports. Power BI is Microsoft's product in that category and the most widely used one in the UAE, largely because most businesses here are already paying for Microsoft 365. Its value is in the questions that span systems.
Sales sits in one system, freight and duty in another, and the customer who looks most profitable on the sales report frequently is not.
Payroll knows the hours, the project ledger knows the budget, and nothing joins them until somebody does it by hand.
Inventory position with slow-moving stock, valued, so the conversation is about money rather than about bin counts.
No single system holds those answers, which is why they usually end up being assembled by hand in Excel once a month by someone who would rather be doing something else.
Dashboard sets
Seven dashboard sets cover most of what a UAE business needs in its first year of Power BI. Each one is built on the same modelled data layer, so the numbers agree with each other and with your accounts.
The one-page view: revenue, margin, cash, order book and headcount against target, with the ability to open any figure and see what it is made of.
P&L and balance sheet against budget, receivables ageing, payables and cash flow forecast, reconciled to the ledger rather than approximated.
Stock position and ageing, purchase pipeline, supplier lead times and fulfilment performance, by location and by item.
Pipeline reporting, win rates, gross margin by customer and product, and the concentration risk nobody looks at until it matters.
Headcount, turnover, absence, overtime and cost per employee, plus visa and document expiry visible far enough ahead to act on.
Cost against budget by project and phase, committed versus actual, and margin at completion. This is the set contractors ask for first, and the one that most often exposes that project cost and the general ledger have never reconciled.
Any recurring report currently built by hand in Excel, rebuilt in Power BI with scheduled refresh and automatic distribution.
Manufacturers add production output and wastage; every set is built on the same model, so a figure means the same thing in all seven.
Reporting automation
Any recurring report currently built by hand in Excel can be automated in Power BI with scheduled refresh and automatic distribution to the people who need it. That is usually where the first measurable return comes from.
Count the reports produced manually each month, multiply by the hours each takes, and add the cost of the decisions delayed while people wait for them. In most UAE mid-market businesses, one person is spending two to four days a month rebuilding the same files.
Scheduled refresh pulls new data at set intervals, direct query shows live data where the source supports it, and reports are delivered on a schedule. Nobody has to open a portal to find out how the month is going.
Where to start
Start with the ones that drive weekly decisions. Three dashboards that get opened every Monday are worth more than a twenty-report suite that impresses in the handover meeting and is abandoned by March.
Who owes what, for how long, and what that does to the cash position this month. The dashboard most likely to change a decision the day it is opened.
By product and by customer, with margin rather than revenue in the headline, because revenue rankings and margin rankings rarely agree.
What is held, what is not moving, and how much cash is sitting in it. Contractors swap this one for project cost against budget.
The suite can come later, once people trust the numbers. Adding reports to a model nobody believes in is the most common way a BI project quietly ends.
Engagement
Typical timeline: two to four weeks for an initial set of three or four dashboards, assuming source data is accessible and reasonably clean. Data preparation and agreeing definitions usually take longer than building the visuals.
What systems hold your data, what condition it is in, and what can be connected directly versus what needs an extract layer.
What connects, and howThe short, unglamorous, essential step. Agreeing what each metric means before anything is built.
Before anything is builtBuilt once, reused by every report afterwards. This is where most of the effort goes and where the quality of everything downstream is decided.
Built once, reused alwaysThe first set, reviewed with the people who will actually use them rather than only with the person who commissioned them.
Reviewed with usersScheduled refresh configured, access and row-level security set, and training so your team can build their own reports on the model rather than coming back for every change.
Your team, self-sufficientThe usual objection
Not initially, and probably not for a while.
Most UAE SMEs run well on direct connections to their ERP plus a few supporting files. Licensing is per user per month for the Pro tier, and most SMEs never leave it.
A warehouse becomes worthwhile when one of these is true. Anyone proposing one before they have seen your data volumes is selling a project rather than solving a problem.
Power BI FAQs
A Power BI consultant connects your data sources, models the data so numbers stay consistent, and builds dashboards that answer specific management questions. Most of the work sits in the data model rather than the visuals — a well-modelled dataset makes every later report quick to build and easy to reconcile.
Business intelligence software pulls data from your ERP, CRM, spreadsheets and other systems into one place and presents it as dashboards and reports. It answers questions that span systems — margin by customer including landed cost, or overtime cost by project — which no single system can answer alone.
Yes. Power BI connects to Odoo, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, SQL databases, Excel files and most cloud services, either directly or through an API. Where an ERP has no native connector, a data extract layer is built so scheduled refreshes run without anyone exporting files manually.
Start with the three that drive weekly decisions: cash and receivables ageing, sales and gross margin by product or customer, and inventory position with slow-moving stock. Contractors add project cost against budget, manufacturers add production and wastage. Three dashboards that get used beat twenty that do not.
Power BI is licensed per user per month for the Pro tier, with a higher capacity tier where report volume or dataset size is large. Licences come from Microsoft; dashboard development is quoted separately, either per report or as a project. Most UAE SMEs run on Pro licences alone.
Two to four weeks for an initial set of three or four dashboards, assuming source data is accessible and reasonably clean. Data preparation and agreeing definitions — what counts as a sale, when revenue is recognised — usually take longer than building the visuals themselves.
Yes. Scheduled refresh pulls new data from your sources at set intervals, and direct query mode shows live data where the source supports it. Reports can be delivered to inboxes on a schedule or viewed in the mobile app, so managers see numbers without having to open a portal.
Not initially. Most UAE SMEs run well on direct connections to their ERP plus a few supporting files. A warehouse becomes worthwhile when you have several source systems, need historical snapshots the source overwrites, or when refresh times start becoming a daily operational problem.
Talk to a consultant
Book a free 30 minute call with QZ Infomatics in Dubai. You will leave it with a platform recommendation, the reasoning behind it, a realistic timeline and an indicative budget band — before you commit to anything.
