R+S Group manages capacity with Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: From Scattered Hours to a Resource Cockpit
Download Now
Company Profile
RUF Gebäudetechnik GmbH, based in Kleinheubach, is part of the R+S Group, a building services specialist headquartered in Fulda. RUF has worked in building technology for more than 75 years – from heating, air conditioning and ventilation to plumbing and building automation. Other companies in the group include R+S solutions and Scholl Energie- und Steuerungstechnik.
In building services, a lot depends on good resource planning: teams from different trades work on many projects in parallel, often for months. Seeing early which teams are busy when makes it easier to accept new orders with confidence, deploy staff where they are needed and avoid bottlenecks.
The Hours Were There, the Overview Was Not
To manage its ongoing projects, RUF lacked a central, consistent view of future workload: which teams and roles are busy when, and what capacity is free for new orders? The hours were available in the project status report of the ERP system Hausmann & Wynen (HW). But for planning and control, they first had to be combined, calculated and prepared.
Reliable control required actual internal costs, forecast, remaining work and available team capacity side by side – across several projects and for each calendar week. This led to two projects that build on each other: first the resource cockpit, then a shared data foundation that the cockpit runs on today.
HICO Group brought the necessary experience with Microsoft Fabric, Power BI and demanding management and analytics applications. Another deciding factor was implementing the business requirements step by step together with RUF – with short communication paths, regular demos and a clear focus on the needs of management, project leads and team leads.
From Project Status Report to Resource Cockpit
- Frank Hefner, Head of Data and Analytics, R+S Group
The first project produced a cockpit in Power BI. It evaluates the hours from the HW project status report and compares actual internal costs, forecast, remaining work and available capacity – by team and role, with detail tables and weekly trends. Interviews with stakeholders identified the workload forecast as the most important use case. A database view supplies the hours, and Microsoft Fabric prepares them. In several review sessions, RUF and HICO Group checked and refined calculations, visuals and usability. After data validation and a pilot phase, the report went live in the Power BI Service and was presented to the team leads.
The biggest hurdle was translating hour fields and wage groups correctly into reliable key figures and handling special cases such as missing project assignments, sub-cost objects or temporary workers. What helped was the step-by-step approach with short feedback loops: each new version was tested immediately with real project data and improved together.
In the second project, the business logic was anchored centrally in Microsoft Fabric. The source data – the ERP system as well as master data from SharePoint and Excel – comes together there. Data Vault records where data comes from and how it has changed. dbt bundles the calculation rules and tests them automatically. The resource cockpit now runs on this foundation: every figure is based on centrally maintained rules and can be traced back to its source.
Resource Capacity at a Glance
For the first time, the resource cockpit shows centrally and interactively where hours and capacity stand across ongoing projects. Team leads and management see actual internal costs, forecast, remaining work and free capacity together and can drill down into project details. This saves manual data collection, anomalies stand out sooner and capacity questions can be answered on a sounder basis.
The shared data foundation benefits every department: controlling can explain figures and reconcile them with the source systems, because changes, origin and load times are documented. IT maintains calculation rules in one place, where they are tested automatically. And management can add new sources and reports without losing existing data and its history.
What started with the resource cockpit is becoming a foundation for the whole group: rollout to R+S solutions and Scholl Energie- und Steuerungstechnik is planned or already being prepared, as is the integration of additional actual hours from ZMI and the further development of the group-wide data model in Microsoft Fabric. The introduction of SLICERBAR is also confirmed: HICO Group’s Power BI extension bundles complex filters into a single bar and makes reports even easier to use.
In the long term, the foundation can support the management of the project portfolio, capacity and sales – with forecasting and early-warning logic as well as additional project, HR and sales data.
