22-25 April 2026

From SAP Extracts to AI-Powered Insights with Business Process Solutions

Proposed session for SQLBits 2026

TL; DR

Unlock SAP data with Business Process Solutions for Fabric. Live demo shows automated deployment of lakehouses and reports, AI-assisted customization via MCP servers, and conversational agents in Teams. Learn to compress weeks of development into days.

Session Details

Finance teams face a persistent challenge: critical data remains locked in SAP while traditional approaches require weeks of IT involvement to extract data, build pipelines, and develop reports. This results in stale information that hampers decision-making and prevents deployment of AI-powered analytics.

This session demonstrates how Microsoft's Business Process Solutions transforms this paradigm by automatically deploying complete data infrastructure for modern financial reporting. Attendees will see live demonstrations of Business Process Solutions connecting SAP to Microsoft Fabric, automatically creating lakehouses, data pipelines, and production-ready financial reports without manual development.

The session then explores how AI assistance through the Power BI MCP Server enables finance professionals to customize pre-built solutions to match organizational requirements. We'll demonstrate adapting hierarchical structures to tabular formats, incorporating reporting standards like IAS 1, and building custom calculations—compressing weeks of specialized development into hours.

Finally, we'll demonstrate deploying Fabric Data Agents into Microsoft Teams for conversational access to live SAP data, and integrating Finance Agents for Excel and custom agents built in Copilot Studio.

Participants will leave with a practical roadmap for transitioning from static, extract-based reporting to live, AI-augmented financial intelligence.

3 things you'll get out of this session

Deploy Business Process Solutions to automatically create complete Fabric infrastructure for SAP financial data without manual development. Use MCP servers and AI assistance to customize pre-built SAP solutions to match organizational reporting requirements and standards. Build and deploy conversational AI agents (Teams, Excel, Copilot Studio) for natural language access to (near) live SAP financial data.

Speakers

Rishi Sapra

rishisapra.com

Rishi Sapra's previous sessions

What does Microsoft Fabric mean for a Finance/Business Analyst?
For a business team such as Finance, Microsoft Fabric allows you to go from being “IT reliant” to “IT enabled” and this session shows you how! Whether you’re a data explorer, data analyst, data engineer – or perhaps a newly coined analytics engineer – we will explore what Microsoft Fabric means for you. We will look at the need for the data platform components in Fabric, applied for a finance data use case, and consider the benefits of this being in a SaaS lakehouse architecture. We will also consider how you need to organise your Finance and IT teams to work best with Fabric so that you have the right capabilities to deliver meaningful financial insights at scale.
 
How to learn fast-changing tech in a post pandemic, Attention-starved world
Struggling to figure out how to learn about new features and pick up new skills in a technology environment that is moving so fast? In this session, Rishi will highlight some key principles of instructional design and how you can use them to become a better learner or teacher!
 
Power BI Governance: 6 steps to success
Learn how to deploy Power BI at scale within a large Enterprise. The mantra behind this is “discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge” - we will cover deploying appropriate guardrails/controls whilst still retaining the notion of “self-service” within the organization.
 
Storytelling With Data
Learn how to present arguments with data to effectively communicate the insights you need to get across
 
Tips and Tricks for working with Finance Data in Power BI
<p>Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes! In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data.
 
The Incidental Business Analyst (BA) – Designing a Finance Power BI Data Model to Tell a Story
Join this session to learn the key steps in designing a data model: Know Your Audience (KYA), Complete a Scoping Template, Define the data granularity/scope and design a conceptual model. We will use time-tested methodologies based on Kimball Data modelling techniques, including a Bus Matrix and Starnet, complete with templates available for you to freely download.