Scalable Power BI Transformation for Affiliate Management: From 5-Hour Reports to Instant Insights

When the established affiliate and partnership marketing agency faced mounting reporting delays in Power BI, they started seeking a vendor to come up with a solution. The GetDevDone team joined the project and helped streamline the client’s reporting architecture, cutting down report generation from over 5 hours to minutes. 

As a result we’ve achieved faster access to critical insights, reduced infrastructure costs, and a scalable system ready for growth.

• Period of cooperation: May 2022 – ongoing
• Expertise: Marketing, Advertising, Digital Marketing 
• Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Project highlights

• Data storing and management:
  Our team led the development and implementation of a forecasting system that aimed to enhance organizational decision-making.
• Reporting performance: By eliminating excessive calculations and backend requests, we improved performance and reduced AWS costs.
• Data optimization: We archived outdated data and split active datasets into smaller tables, lifted the AWS computing strain, sped up report generation, and prepared the business for future scaling. 

Business challenge

When our client’s base grew from thousands to several hundred thousand records, it became clear that their Power BI platform could not keep up.  At the time, generating a single report in Power BI took more than five hours as the platform struggled with increased loads and large, unoptimized data files.

Additionally, key metrics were buried alongside outdated information, overwhelming the system and hindering timely decision-making. Our client was seeking a solid solution to organize its data.

Technology solution

The client’s goals were clear: optimize their BI environment to enable faster, more actionable insights. GetDevDone experts had to optimize data for an improved decision-making experience.
We started with a deep dive into the client’s existing Power BI environment. Our team of two, a Power BI engineer and a PM, identified critical inefficiencies in data storage, report queries, and platform architecture.

Data Restructuring & Performance Optimization
We restructured oversized datasets by archiving rarely used data and breaking the remaining data into smaller, query-optimized tables. Through techniques like binning, clustering, and compression, we kept file sizes below 1GB and minimized AWS computing strain. Backend improvements included rewriting queries, applying indexes and partitions, and configuring single-direction relationships to avoid circular dependencies.

Forecasting System Integration
The client wanted to do more than report on the past, they needed to plan the future. We built a forecasting module using historical data and AutoML models. These models now provide estimates on channel performance, marketing ROI, and profitability by partner type, all within the Power BI interface.Front-End & UX Enhancements
To improve user experience, we implemented streaming operations, preloaded visuals for dashboards, and removed redundant queries, reducing report loading time to under 10 minutes.

Tech Stack:

Power BI (DAX), AWS Redshift (SQL), PowerQuery (M)

Business outcome

The Power BI transformation drove both immediate and strategic value:

• Report Speed – Reduced generation time from 5 hours to under 10 minutes, empowering daily decision-making across marketing and finance.
• Cost Reduction – Optimized AWS compute and storage costs by minimizing data bloat and inefficient queries.
• Forecasting Capabilities – The forecasting module enables accurate projections of revenue by campaign, channel, and partner, used daily for ROI and budget decisions.
• Improved Scalability – The new data model supports hundreds of thousands of records with zero loss in performance.
• Usability Gains – Analytics and accounting teams now operate in a faster, cleaner, and more stable reporting environment.

What’s next? 

After a strong start with solid results, the client has engaged our GetDevDone team for the next phase of their reporting transformation. 

We’re working to apply the same performance improvements across the client’s remaining Power BI reports and implement measures to futureproof the system for future expansions.

Another upcoming initiative is redesigning the client’s input data structure within AWS. By reworking ingestion pipelines and adapting Power BI to the new architecture, we aim to reduce technical overhead, enhance processing efficiency, and ensure long-term maintainability.

As the client’s operations and data demands evolve, our ongoing collaboration will focus on building a BI ecosystem that’s not just fast and cost-effective but also- future-ready.