BI had become a bottleneck
Before Fabric, Premier Roofing's teams had no simple way to explore data across systems on their own. If someone needed a cross-system answer, they had two options: wait for the BI team to build a report or manually stitch exports together in spreadsheets. That created delay, inconsistency, and constant interruption for the technical team.
- Cross-system questions required manual Excel work
- Shared reports had to be queued and built by BI
- Users could only see the answer to the exact question they asked earlier
- Analysts and technical staff were pulled into repetitive ad hoc requests
“If they needed a cross-system report, they had to export it into Excel and VLOOKUP things together.”
The real problem wasn't just delay. It was lost momentum.
When leaders have to wait for an answer, they lose the context around why they needed it in the first place. That slows down decision-making, breaks flow, and forces teams to revisit work they were already in the middle of. For Premier Roofing, that meant business questions were not just taking too long. They were interrupting the people responsible for both maintaining data systems and moving bigger technical initiatives forward.
In mid-size companies, the data team owns more than data
At companies like Premier Roofing, the “data team” isn't just building dashboards. They're now responsible for the IT, data and AI layer of the business.
That means they're not just answering questions. They're accountable for whether the answers are correct, secure, and reliable. And every ad hoc request, broken dashboard, or inconsistent metric pulls them further away from that responsibility.
“When you're the data team, you're not just data engineers — You're responsible for the entire data, AI and tech stack.”
Fabric gave Premier a self-serve answer layer on top of its warehouse
Fabric was implemented on top of Premier Roofing's clean data warehouse, giving teams a single place to ask business questions in plain English and get immediate answers. Instead of filing a request, waiting for dashboard work, or exporting data into spreadsheets, users could go straight to the source of truth and explore what they needed on demand.
Ask in plain English
Business users can ask questions without SQL or dashboard building.
Get cross-system answers
Fabric sits on top of warehouse-ready data to return answers fast.
Keep teams in flow
Answers arrive in the moment, without breaking momentum or pulling analysts into every request.
Faster answers. Less interruption. More leverage for the team.
1. Answers moved from about a week to seconds
Premier could dramatically reduce the cycle time between question and answer.
2. Business users could explore without waiting on BI
Teams no longer had to rely on a report queue for every question.
3. Technical staff had fewer ad hoc interruptions
Fabric reduced the need to constantly stop strategic work to validate or produce one-off answers.
4. Teams started asking questions that previously went unanswered
Early users across training, accounting, revenue, and operations began using the system to explore live business questions.
“Our team are asking questions that nobody ever got to answering before.”
Phase 2
From answer engine to unified decision layer
Phase 1 proved self-serve answers. Phase 2 is about making Fabric the one place teams ask, explore, and decide—without bouncing between BI tools and ad hoc exports.
- Replace or reduce dependence on Power BI
- Pin trusted visuals and dashboards inside the same interface
- Expand into additional systems and departments
- Move from reactive Q&A toward proactive recommendations
“We're excited for phase 2 with Fabric—it will replace Power BI once and for all and become our unified question and decision layer.”
