1 - Introduction to Plan (preview)

This section explores the core capabilities of plan (preview).

1. Fabric Plan provides three integrated capabilities natively in Microsoft Fabric on top of your semantic models:

   • Enterprise Planning

   • Integrated Intelligence

   • Data Management using PowerTable

   

1. Access planning capabilities in Microsoft Fabric through the Plan (preview) item, which is part of the IQ and Power BI workloads in Microsoft Fabric.

Enterprise Planning

1. Enterprise Planning supports business users in building no-code and self-service planning, budgeting, and forecasting apps directly on top of semantic models. It provides coverage for multiple planning methods.

1. Enterprise Planning supports users across the enterprise in implementing department-specific and function-specific planning use cases.

Data Management using PowerTable

1. Data Management using PowerTable enables the management of forward-looking reference data for planning and reporting apps.

Imagine you have a product that is yet to be launched. You can add products to the product list before launch and capture details such as classification, price, and description without IT or specialist involvement. Planning and reporting apps can use the updated reference data immediately.

1. Data Management using PowerTable also supports no-code, self-service data apps beyond reference data management.

Build a wide variety of apps including status tracking apps, form-based data collection apps, project and time tracking apps, and apps with multi-level approval workflows, event-driven automation, and cascading updates.

Integrated Intelligence

1. Integrated Intelligence provides an analytics and reporting engine for plan and performance data in a unified view. It consumes data from semantic models for actuals, planning sheets for budgets and forecasts, and data apps for reference data to deliver insights in near real time.

1. Integrated Intelligence also supports financial reporting, paginated reporting, and other analytics use cases.

Benefits of using plan (preview)

1. A key benefit of planning within your data platform is that you don't need to build or configure security from scratch. Plan inherits security from Microsoft Fabric.

   Security defined at the platform, workspace, and data/semantic model layers are inherited. You can further configure app-level security to control permissions and access for specific users and teams.

1. Plan enables you to build scalable planning apps on your data platform and implement multiple methods to improve scalability.

1. You can use OneLake shortcuts and mirroring to bring in data stored in external platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, SAP, BigQuery, and Oracle.

Start building no-code, self-service apps on Microsoft Fabric today with Plan.