Show notes
We're recording our last episode before the Swedish summer holidays, and to close things out we welcome back Jinnie Wong for a return conversation on Business Performance Analytics — this time joined by members of her engineering team, including Yaswant Vishwakarma, who leads the pipeline work, and Wei (Weizhu), who's building the Analytics MCP server. Rishabh Kamra rounds out the crew.
A lot has happened since Ginny's last visit. Back then, BPA had just shipped Record-to-Report and Procure-to-Pay and was on the cusp of Order-to-Cash. The data model now spans the entire ERP, with models for supply chain management, project operations, human resources, and commerce rolling out over the coming year. The recurring theme of the episode is that the real magic lives under the hood: BPA's fact tables sit at the transaction level, and the heavy lifting is in the data engineering — star schemas conformed across dimensions, and transform pipelines that scale automatically from a million rows to a hundred million as data volumes grow. Johan makes the case that for anyone who's ever wrestled with hand-built cubes and bespoke star schemas, a shared, downloadable model built on near-identical ERP data is the single biggest win here.
We dig into the extensibility story — publishing the BPA model into Microsoft Fabric to build a single unified model — and the features in flight: custom measures (currently in private preview), with custom tables and columns targeted for later this year. The conversation then turns to the Dynamics 365 ERP Analytics MCP server, which sits on top of BPA's semantic model and lets you go from a CFO's question to an answer through natural language, with row-level security enforced so a procurement manager and a sales manager never see each other's data. Wei's analogy lands well: MCP is the cordless vacuum — strip away the UX plumbing and you spend your time on insight, not cord management.
We also cover the roadmap many customers are waiting on: more frequent and manual data refreshes (expected around August), the path from the current eight-quarter window toward seven years of history with automatic archival, expanded capacity, and the question everyone asks — financial reporting. There are no immediate plans to deprecate financial reporting, but BPA is the natural next step, with single-source validation as a key advantage. And yes, it remains included in the Dynamics 365 Finance license; you pay for storage and compute, not a separate product. GA for the MCP server is aimed at the second half of the year.
If you want to go deeper, Ginny hosts office hours every Tuesday at 8 a.m., a monthly CAB on the last Thursday, and an active Viva Engage community where the team answers questions directly.
Read more on Microsoft Learn:
Business performance analytics: https://learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/finance/business-performance-analytics/business-performance…
Dynamics 365 ERP Analytics MCP (preview): https://learn.microsoft.com/dynamics365/finance/business-performance-analytics/erp-analytics-mcp-ov…
Jinnie Wong - Jinnie Wong, CDMP | LinkedIn
Wei Zhu - Wei Z. | LinkedIn
Yaswant Vishwakarma - Yaswant Vishwakarma | LinkedIn
A big thank you to Ginny, Yashwant, Wei, and the whole BPA team.
/Gustav and Johan