Case Study: Nokia achieves rapid COVID-19 HR insights and unified analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Nokia’s strong Power BI foundation enabled quick solutions for critical HR insights when COVID-19 surfaced

Nokia, a global telecommunications and infrastructure company, faced the challenge of consolidating and bringing analytics to its HR data after the Alcatel‑Lucent acquisition left them with disparate records for roughly 50,000 employees. To create a unified, data-driven HR function, Nokia adopted Microsoft Power BI (alongside Azure services like Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Analysis Services) to standardize visualization and reporting across the organization.

Using Microsoft Power BI as the front end and Azure tooling to ingest and centralize data, Nokia replaced static scorecards with interactive dashboards and built a suite of HR reports—most notably COVID‑19 dashboards created in three weeks and updated daily. These solutions aggregated workforce, site status, travel restrictions and sentiment data from ~30,000 weekly survey responses, made all HR metrics accessible to leaders within a year, improved cross-team collaboration, and accelerated decision-making, helping Nokia become one of the top Microsoft Power BI users globally.

Nokia