Power BI Migration from Teradata, SAP BOBJ, and Tableau

The client is a Fortune 500 industrial MRO distributor operating two technology-enabled go-to-market models: a high-touch solutions business and a self-service online business. Together they serve millions of active customers across tens of millions of products through dozens of distribution centers. Taller's engagement at the industrial distributor is concentrated in two long-running workstreams captured in Volume II. The first is the BI and Data Engineering organization operating under the client's BI manager, where Taller engineers support their enterprise data modernization initiative encompassing the Teradata-to-Snowflake migration, Microsoft Fabric adoption, and consolidation of reporting tools into Power BI. This workstream focuses on the industrial distributor's analytical ecosystem, providing the data warehousing, reporting, and business intelligence capabilities that support enterprise decision-making. The second workstream is the SAP Commerce (Hybris) engineering team supporting the company's e-commerce site, the company's primary transactional e-commerce channel. Within this organization, Taller engineers contribute to vulnerability remediation efforts across Veracode, Snyk, SonarQube, and Rapid7 findings, production support, API development within the Spring extension layer, and the ongoing migration toward a microservices-based architecture. A parallel QA Automation team operates within the SAP Commerce delivery cadence and has modernized CI/CD practices through the migration from Bamboo to GitHub-based workflows. While not separately captured in Volume II, this work is presented below as a supplemental case study.

The industrial distributor was migrating its data warehouse from Teradata to Snowflake and used the transition as the moment to consolidate reporting from SAP BOBJ and Tableau onto Power BI, with the explicit goal of reducing reporting cost while standardizing the analytic surface. BI consolidation projects fail more often than they succeed because the new platform inherits the existing reports rather than the existing decisions those reports were supposed to support.

Taller is leading the Power BI migration end-to-end, including replicating Tableau reports in Power BI semantics, running the Power BI Admin group, leveraging Microsoft Fabric for analytics and data integration, building proof-of-concept dashboards across business areas, and training internal users. The discipline that earns the outcome is treating each Tableau report as a question rather than a deliverable. This includes replicating the question in Power BI semantics and then validating with the original business owner that the new report actually answers it. Admin-group operation matters because tenant governance is what distinguishes a sustainable Power BI deployment from one that produces shadow IT within months.

Taller's migration produced reduced reporting costs across the consolidated platform and enhanced reporting infrastructure aligned to the Snowflake-based data-warehouse roadmap.

BI platform consolidation is a consequential operational decision; the platform that wins the consolidation becomes the surface every business team operates against for the next decade. The industrial distributor's choice to consolidate on Power BI alongside the Snowflake migration aligns the BI and data-platform strategies into one coherent posture.