ERP Change Without Reporting Gaps

ERP modernization with Microsoft Fabric

MADIS designed and built a Microsoft Fabric and Power BI platform that kept management reporting continuous through JátékNet’s move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

At a glance

0

days lost in management reporting

2 ERPs

one continuous view of the data

97M+

historical transaction records unified

Summary: When JátékNet replaced its ERP system, management could not afford to lose sight of sales and margins. MADIS built a Microsoft Fabric data warehouse and Power BI reporting layer that combines data from the old and the new ERP into one seamless view – so the system change never showed up in the management reports.

The client

JátékNet and the Modellhobby group form one of Hungary’s leading online and offline toy retailers. The business is built mainly on B2C webshop sales, complemented by physical stores and B2B wholesale, and it sells to several European countries.

Its range covers classic toys, models, creative and hobby products, RC models and accessories. This multi-channel, multi-country operation means management needs to see performance broken down by sales channel, country, customer and supplier.

The challenge

JátékNet’s management relies on fast, reliable daily reporting on sales, inventory and margins from all of its source systems. Then the group decided to move from its previous ERP to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

An ERP change usually creates a blind spot: years of history sit in the old system, while the new one has only just started collecting data – with a different structure and different business logic. Bridging the gap manually in spreadsheets is fragile and error-prone. Management’s expectation was clear: reporting could not stop, and the switch could not be visible in the reports.

• Two systems, two logics: the same sale, return or margin was recorded in different fields and under different rules in the two ERPs.
• Scale: more than 97 million historical transaction records had to remain fast and usable.
• Data integrity: type mismatches and silent data shifts had to be prevented at every step.
• No downtime: there could be no migration weekend during which reporting went dark.

Our approach

Our guiding principle was simple: management should see one continuous picture, regardless of which system a number comes from.

1 – Locking the past as a stable foundation

Data from the previous ERP was closed at a cut-over date. Since no new records are added to it, this history is stored once as a stable base and does not need to be reprocessed every day – which is also what keeps the reports fast.

2 – Going live on the fly

New data from Business Central was connected to the historical data continuously, without any downtime. New SQL view layers in the Fabric Warehouse present the two periods to Power BI as one single logical table.

3 – Aligning the business logic

The hardest part of the work was making every business concept mean exactly the same before and after the cut-over date. This required a deep understanding of the business, well beyond development. One quality principle guided the work throughout: errors must never appear silently. A process that stops visibly is better than an unreliable number in a management report.

The solution

The solution is a Microsoft Fabric data warehouse with a Power BI reporting layer. JátékNet’s internal IT team transfers Business Central data to Azure Data Lake, from where it flows into the Fabric environment built by MADIS for processing.

The platform:

• Unifies data from the source systems, including the previous ERP, Business Central, the webshop and warehouse management.
• Provides consistent calculations in one semantic model, broken down by sales channel, country, customer and supplier.
• Supports both ad-hoc analysis and scheduled management dashboards.
• Keeps the data continuous across the ERP change, so management sees one uninterrupted history.

Technologies: Microsoft Fabric (Warehouse, Lakehouse) · SQL · Power BI · Power Query M · DAX · Tabular Editor · Dynamics 365 Business Central

Results

After the first major joint release, JátékNet’s management sees sales in a single report with one calculation logic – from the start of the old system’s history to the data that arrived from Business Central this morning.

• Continuous time series: monthly and yearly comparisons span the system change, side by side in the same report.
• No blind spot: management kept full visibility and decision-making ability throughout the transition.
• Single source of truth: manual spreadsheet merging was replaced by an automated, validated data view refreshed every morning.
• Reliable numbers: data from before and after the cut-over date is genuinely comparable.

Facing an ERP change or a data integration project?

Let’s talk about how to keep decision-making continuous while your systems change.