A $3,000 Dashboard or a $0.30 AI Report? When You May Not Need Full BI
The traditional way to build management dashboards is well known. First, a company chooses a BI platform such as Power BI, Tableau, DataLens, or another visualization tool. Then it builds a data warehouse where information from operational systems can be collected, cleaned, transformed, and aggregated. After that, data marts are created, calculations are implemented, scheduled data uploads are configured, and dashboards are designed on top of the resulting structure. Eventually, management gets a polished dashboard with charts, filters, tabs, and indicators. This approach works. It is still the industry standard, and an entire implementation market has grown around it: BI vendors, consultants, integrators, analysts, and data engineers. But while building Logsheet.ai , our production log sheet platform, we faced a practical question. We needed dashboards. We had two options: Build a conventional BI layer with a warehouse, data marts, integrations, and custom dashboard development....