Custom Power BI dashboards for manufacturing operations — OEE tracking, production monitoring, supply chain visibility — plus SSRS-to-Power BI Report Server migration before the 2033 end-of-support deadline. FreedomDev has 20+ years of SQL Server and .NET expertise in Zeeland, Michigan. Projects range from $15K to $100K+.
Power BI has become the default business intelligence platform for Microsoft-centric enterprises. If your organization runs SQL Server, Azure, Dynamics 365, or SharePoint, Power BI is the natural analytics layer — it connects natively, shares the same security model, and embeds directly into Teams. For manufacturers running on Microsoft infrastructure, there is no closer thing to a turnkey BI solution.
But there is a more urgent reason to invest in Power BI right now: SSRS is being sunset. Microsoft will not release another version of SQL Server Reporting Services after SQL Server 2022. Security updates continue until January 2033, but no new features, no new versions, and no future roadmap. Power BI Report Server is the designated replacement — a superset of SSRS that handles both interactive Power BI reports and legacy paginated SSRS reports in the same environment.
For the thousands of enterprises still running SSRS for operational reporting, this is not a theoretical future concern. It is a migration that needs to be planned now, while support still exists and while your team still has SSRS expertise in-house. Every year you wait, the institutional knowledge to execute the migration erodes as SSRS specialists retire or move on.
FreedomDev has built SQL Server reporting systems for over two decades. We have converted hundreds of SSRS reports to Power BI paginated reports and interactive dashboards. We understand the RDL format, the subscription architecture, the data source configurations, and the edge cases that trip up teams attempting self-service migration. More importantly, we build the Power BI dashboards that replace those static reports with something that actually drives decisions — real-time KPI tracking, drill-through analysis, and natural language Q&A that your operations managers can use without calling IT.
This page covers the three areas where we see the highest demand: manufacturing dashboard development with specific KPIs, SSRS-to-Power BI migration, and Power BI Embedded for ISV products. If you are an IT director or operations manager evaluating Power BI, this is the practical guide we wish existed when we started this work.
SSRS is being sunset after SQL Server 2022 — no new versions, security patches only until January 2033. Power BI Report Server is the designated replacement and a superset of SSRS: it runs your existing paginated reports (RDL/RDLC) alongside interactive Power BI reports in the same portal. FreedomDev handles the full migration — report conversion, subscription reconfiguration, data source remapping, user retraining, and parallel-run validation to confirm every number matches before you decommission the old server. Our SQL Server and .NET background means we understand the plumbing that most Power BI consultants skip.
Production monitoring dashboards built around the KPIs that actually matter on a factory floor: OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), cycle time, scrap rate, first-pass yield, on-time delivery, and inventory turnover. We connect Power BI to your MES, ERP (Dynamics 365, SAP, or custom), PLC/SCADA historians, and quality management systems. The result is a single-pane-of-glass view that your operations managers check every morning instead of waiting for end-of-month Excel summaries.
Power BI Embedded lets you add interactive analytics to your own software products without building a visualization engine from scratch. Two models: 'App Owns Data' for customer-facing SaaS products (your customers never need a Power BI license), and 'User Owns Data' for internal portals where users sign in with their organization credentials. We handle capacity planning, row-level security, custom themes to match your brand, and the JavaScript embed API integration.
Power BI Copilot is the 2026 differentiator that separates Power BI from every competitor. AI-generated DAX measures, natural language report summaries, automatic insight detection, and conversational data exploration — your executives ask questions in plain English and get answers with visualizations. FreedomDev configures Copilot for your semantic model, trains your team to use it effectively, and builds the data model quality that Copilot needs to produce accurate answers.
Board-ready financial dashboards — P&L, cash flow, budget variance, departmental cost allocation — connected to your general ledger, ERP, and planning tools. Power BI's paginated report capability (the replacement for SSRS) handles pixel-perfect financial statements that need to print correctly, while interactive dashboards let your CFO drill from summary to transaction-level detail.
A slow Power BI report is almost always a data model problem, not a visualization problem. We redesign star schemas, optimize DAX calculations, implement incremental refresh, configure aggregations for large datasets, and tune DirectQuery connections when import mode is not feasible. Average result: 60–80% reduction in report load time for poorly performing dashboards.
Skip the recruiting headaches. Our experienced developers integrate with your team and deliver from day one.
We had 200+ SSRS reports accumulated over a decade. FreedomDev audited the entire inventory, migrated the 40 critical ones to Power BI, converted another 30 to interactive dashboards that our managers actually use daily, and archived the rest. The whole migration took 14 weeks and our team was trained before the old server was decommissioned.
A real-time OEE dashboard that pulls availability, performance, and quality data from your MES and PLC systems. Operators see current OEE by line and shift. Managers see trends, Pareto charts for downtime reasons, and drill-through to individual machine performance. McKinsey research shows productivity climbs 20% when manufacturers track performance in real time — the dashboard is the mechanism that makes that tracking actionable.
Your organization has 50, 200, or 500+ SSRS reports built over the last decade. Some are critical operational reports that run on schedules and land in inboxes every morning. Others are ad-hoc reports nobody has opened in years. We audit the full inventory, categorize by usage and criticality, convert high-value reports to Power BI paginated reports or interactive dashboards, archive the rest, and validate output accuracy in a parallel-run period before cutover.
Inventory turnover, supplier lead time tracking, purchase order aging, on-time delivery rates, and demand forecast vs. actual comparison. Connected to your ERP (Dynamics 365, SAP, or custom) and supplier portals. Gives procurement and operations teams a shared view of supply chain health instead of siloed spreadsheets that are always two weeks out of date.
You build software for a specific industry — logistics, healthcare, construction, whatever — and your customers want analytics inside your product, not exported to a separate tool. Power BI Embedded with the App Owns Data model lets you add interactive dashboards and reports to your application using a single capacity license (not per-user), with row-level security ensuring each customer only sees their own data. We handle the embed API integration, capacity sizing, and custom theming.
Track scrap rate, first-pass yield, rework hours, and defect categorization by product, line, shift, and operator. Connect to your quality management system or MES to automate data capture. Statistical process control charts (SPC) in Power BI show when a process is drifting before it produces out-of-spec parts. This is the dashboard your quality manager uses to prioritize improvement projects based on actual cost impact, not gut feel.
Some organizations are migrating from Tableau to Power BI for cost reasons — Power BI's capacity pricing model is significantly cheaper than Tableau's per-user model at enterprise scale, especially when the organization already pays for Microsoft 365 E5 (which includes Power BI Pro). We handle Tableau workbook conversion, data source migration, user retraining, and Tableau Server decommissioning.