Power BI.

CIVILE is an engineering, consulting, and training company in the civil, environmental, agronomic, and forestry sectors. It provides its human resources and technology to both public and private clients to ensure the satisfaction of their needs. For its management, they use Odoo, one of the most complete and widely used ERPs on the market .

Most ERP platforms on the market (and specifically Odoo, with full certainty) have modules related to data exploitation and, of course, offer possibilities to develop customized functionality in this regard. However, why not use specialized tools for this purpose? Just as we use an ERP to manage invoices, why not use a data analysis tool to analyze data? In this scenario, what are the challenges posed by the project ?

Implement an interface capable of consuming any data or model from Odoo. Automate the integration between Odoo and Power BI to avoid manual intermediate exports and imports, which cause time loss, formatting issues, and data outdatedness. Maintain data access security by applying visibility rules based on users and profiles from Odoo itself.

Power BI, custom connectors, and the Odoo API . To implement the communication interface between Odoo and Power BI, we choose to develop a Custom Connector component. This component, responsible for consuming Odoo data in real-time and loading it into Power BI, will also make use of the API provided by Odoo. This API allows any third-party application (in this case, our Custom Connector) to request data from Odoo after authentication.

Authentication and access permissions . For the connector to use the Odoo API, it must first authenticate. To do this, a user and password mechanism is implemented using Odoo's built-in authentication system. Practically, this means that Power BI will ask the user for their Odoo credentials each time they want to load or refresh data. In this way, access to Odoo data through Power BI is secured, and the management of access permissions and data visibility is delegated to Odoo's own user and role system.

Parameterization and model consumption . Once authentication is completed, the Power BI connector is ready to request the information the user desires. Odoo contains a large number of data models, which can grow as additional modules are added or developed. Given this changing scenario, it is necessary to provide the user with the ability to specify the list of models they wish to load.

One step further in business data analytics . The provided solution streamlines and automates a critical business process: the collection and loading of data for analysis with the goal of improving decision-making.

It also provides the use of specialized tools for this purpose, but in a fully integrated manner, focusing on building a specialized and cohesive ecosystem. This will allow, in the future, the integration of data from other corporate systems onto the same platform, thus creating a unified Data Center .

Automation of the data loading process from Odoo to Microsoft Power BI. Security when obtaining, manipulating data, and extracting business insights. Real-time integration between the different systems of the organization.