Case Study: Cummins achieves fast, governed self-service analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Cummins uses self-service BI to increase productivity and reduce unnecessary costs

Cummins, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of engines and power systems with more than 10,000 employees, faced slow, IT-dependent reporting, fragmented data across business segments, and an ungoverned surge in self-service BI that led to duplicated datasets, system slowdowns and rising infrastructure costs. To overcome these challenges the company adopted Microsoft Power BI (together with Azure) as its primary BI platform to give business users quicker access to analytics while improving governance.

Using Microsoft Power BI plus Azure infrastructure, Cummins consolidated data into a managed Azure environment, created a BI Center of Excellence, and published standardized Power BI apps (on dedicated Premium capacity) backed by SQL Server Analysis Services models. The change eliminated hardware replacement costs, reduced maintenance overhead, delivered timelier, more trusted reports, freed IT for strategic work, and “saved hours of manual report generation every month,” while empowering users to build custom analytics from a single, governed data source.

Cummins

Sherry Jared

IT Director and Enterprise BI Service Leader