Power BI Managed Services
Dashboards that stay live, fast, and trusted every month
Stop firefighting broken refreshes, missing measures, and ad hoc requests piling up in Slack. Get a named Power BI lead, a published service-level agreement, and a monthly retainer that keeps every report you depend on running quietly in the background.
Submit your current Power BI estate › 30-minute discovery call within 48 hours › coverage proposal with service-level agreement and price in 5 days › named lead assigned in week one
120+ Power BI tenants under
active care
4-hour service-level agreement on Priority 1
Microsoft Solutions Partner
Why In-House Power BI Keeps Breaking
The dashboard that ran last quarter is quietly failing today
Power BI does not fail loudly. Refreshes silently drop rows. Measures inherit stale logic. A new finance hire asks for a tweak and a contractor breaks the model. Without an owner, every report you depend on is decaying right now.
What you are living with
- Refreshes fail at 6am and nobody knows until 9am
Finance opens reports for the standup and sees yesterday's numbers. Someone messages the analyst. The analyst is on paid time off.
- A small fix takes three weeks
The one person who knows DAX is buried under build requests. Ticket 248 from August is still open.
- Two reports show two different revenue numbers
Same measure, different filters, no governance. Leadership stops trusting the dashboards and rebuilds Excel.
- Workspace sprawl is out of control
Forty workspaces, twelve gateways, three premium capacities, and no record of who owns what.
- Your business intelligence lead just resigned
No documentation. No handover. Six months of tribal knowledge walks out the door on a Friday.
What life looks like on a retainer
- Refreshes monitored proactively, alerts go to us first
We see the failure at 6:02am, retry the gateway, fix the source, and post a status update before the standup starts.
- Change requests resolved in days, not weeks
Submit a request, a Power BI engineer scopes it within 24 hours, and most enhancements ship inside the same sprint.
- One governed semantic model, one set of measures
Certified datasets, versioned DAX, change log per measure. Revenue means revenue everywhere.
- A documented tenant map you actually own
Workspace inventory, gateway register, capacity utilisation, dataset lineage. Updated monthly and shared with your team.
- Continuity through staff changes
Your retainer team and runbooks stay. When your business intelligence lead leaves, dashboards keep running without you noticing.
Built For The People Who Own Power BI In Your Business
Same retainer. Three very different jobs done quietly each week
Managed services means something different to the Chief Information Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, and the operations lead. Switch personas to see exactly what we run, what you stop touching, and what arrives in your inbox.
What The Retainer Covers For IT
A Power BI estate you can audit on a Tuesday afternoon
- Tenant governance: workspace policy, sensitivity labels, row-level security review
- Gateway and capacity health, premium per user audit, license rightsizing
- Refresh monitoring with proactive alerts before users notice
- Tenant map updated monthly, full dataset and dataflow lineage
What stops being your problem
3am gateway alerts, the workspace sprawl audit before SOC reviews, and the panic when your business intelligence analyst resigns.
Tenant Health Monitor
Live
Updated 14s ago
Workspaces
42
3 deprecated this month
Gateways
6
All online
Premium per-user seats
38
7 inactive
Refresh activity (last 24 hours)
Finance Close
96% pass
Sales Operations
100% pass
Inventory
2 retries
Human Resources Analytics
100% pass
06:02 AM · auto remediation
Inventory dataset refresh failed (source timeout). Gateway retry triggered. Refresh succeeded 06:14 AM. No user impact.
What The Retainer Covers For Finance
Close reports your auditor can sign without a Slack thread
- Certified semantic model with versioned, documented DAX measures
- Reconciliation packs against the general ledger on day 1 of close
- Change log per measure: who edited, when, why, prior value
- Self-serve profit and loss drill with locked numerators, safe to give to budget owners
What stops being your problem
Two versions of revenue, calling the analyst at 9pm on close night, and explaining to the auditor why a measure changed.
FY26 Period 3 close pack
Certified · reconciled to general ledger · signed
off by retainer lead
Revenue
$14.82M
Matches general ledger to $0
Gross margin
41.2%
versus 39.8% prior
Operating expenses
$4.31M
Within forecast
Days to close
4
3 days fewer than last year
Recent measure changes
[Revenue (Net)]edited 3 May · logged
[Gross Margin %]edited 2 May · logged
[Operating Expenses Year-to-Date]edited 28 Apr · logged
What The Retainer Covers For Operations
Daily operational dashboards that just work, every shift
- Hourly refresh on inventory, fulfilment, and on-time delivery boards
- Alerts to Microsoft Teams when key performance indicators cross a threshold you set
- Mobile-first views for floor managers, no laptop needed
- Quick change requests: new filter, new visual, new key performance indicator shipped in days
What stops being your problem
Manual end-of-shift Excel exports, chasing IT for a missing filter, and the dashboard breaking the day before a board review.
Shift overview · Plant 04
Refreshes hourly
On-time, in-full
97.4%
Above 95% target
Units shipped
3,142
Shift 1 of 2
Defect rate
0.42%
Within tolerance
Line status
Line A
Running
Line B
Running
Line C
Slowdown
Line D
Running
Alert sent to Teams · 14:08
Line C throughput dropped 30% below shift average. Floor lead acknowledged at 14:11.
Auto advances every 4 seconds · click any persona to
switchSame retainer. Three audiences served.
Inside Every Power BI Retainer
Eight workstreams running quietly every month
Each pillar has a named owner on our team, a measurable output, and a published frequency. No vague "ongoing support" line items. You see what you pay for, every retainer report.
24/7
monitoring
Pillar 01
Refresh and pipeline health
We monitor every scheduled refresh, dataflow, and gateway. Failures trigger retries first, then a human, then an alert to you.
1
source of truth
Pillar 02
Semantic model stewardship
Certified datasets, versioned DAX, a measure dictionary your finance team can read. One revenue, one margin, one customer.
48h
change service-level agreement
Pillar 03
Change request queue
New visual, new measure, new filter, new role. Triaged within 24 hours, scoped within 48, most shipped inside the same sprint.
4h
Priority 1 response
Pillar 04
Incident service-level agreement support
Severity-tiered response: 4-hour Priority 1, 1 business day Priority 2, 3 days Priority 3. Each tier has a named engineer and a stabilisation playbook.
40h
analyst time per month
Pillar 05
Reserved engineer hours
A fixed monthly block of senior Power BI engineer time you direct: new builds, redesigns, training, exploratory analysis.
Mon
cadence
Pillar 06
Weekly governance call
Same time every week. Backlog, risks, refresh exceptions, capacity, and what we are quietly improving without being asked.
100%
documented
Pillar 07
Runbook and lineage documentation
Every report has a runbook, every dataset has lineage, every workspace has an owner. Updated each month and shared with you.
2
quarterly reviews
Pillar 08
Strategic review and roadmap
Quarterly executive review with Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer: where the data estate is heading, what to invest in next, what to retire.
Inside A Typical Week
Monday governance call. Tuesday model review. Wednesday sprint demo. Thursday root cause analysis. Friday release.
Predictable rhythm. Your team always knows what is happening this week, who is doing it, and when it lands in production.
5 ceremonies per week2 demos per sprint1 quarterly business review per quarter
What we handle so you do not have to
Power BI operations, end to end
- DAX, M, semantic model design and tuning
- Gateway and capacity administration, license review
- Row-level security, sensitivity labels, workspace governance
- Refresh monitoring, retry logic, source-side troubleshooting
- Documentation, runbooks, and full lineage maps
What your team keeps owning
Business decisions, not business intelligence plumbing
- Defining what key performance indicators matter this quarter
- Sign off on new measures and certified datasets
- Prioritising the change request queue each week
- Telling us when something in the business changes
- Approximately 2 to 3 hours per week of your team's time
The Cost Of Staying Put
A part-time business intelligence analyst is the most expensive way to run Power BI
Compare the loaded cost of one in-house business intelligence engineer against a Redefine retainer. Then add the cost of dashboards that fail at the wrong time, and decisions delayed by a week.
One analyst on paid time off for two weeks = 11 days of unmonitored refreshes. One missed close-night refresh = CFO reconciling manually on a Sunday. Conservative estimate: $210,000+ per year in hidden business intelligence operating costs for a 500-person company.
Option A
One mid-level business intelligence engineer in-house
$118,000
per year loaded
- Single point of failure when they take paid time off
- No senior architect coverage for hard problems
- Recruiting cycle restarts if they resign
- No 24/7 monitoring, no service-level agreement, no runbooks
Recommended
Option B
Redefine managed services retainer
from $6,400
per month
- Pod: engineer, architect, project lead, governance
- Reserved engineer hours plus full operations coverage
- Published service-level agreement, monthly retainer report, no surprises
- Cancel month-to-month after first 90 days
Option C
The status quo: keep firefighting
approximately $210,000
per year hidden
- Senior leadership time spent re-reconciling reports
- Decisions delayed when refreshes fail at month-end
- Contractor day rates ramping every emergency
- Excel sprawl returning, governance dying
Inline Retainer Estimator
Approximate your retainer in 30 seconds
Slide the dials. We will refine the price during your scoping call against your actual estate.
Estimated retainer
$6,400
per month
covers 35 reports, 12 daily refreshes, 40 engineer hours
Book A Scoping CallIndicative only. Final price set after a 30-minute scoping call against your tenant.
Submit your estate details › call within 48 hours › scoped proposal in 5 days › named pod assigned in week one of sign-off
Your team's time investment across a full retainer is approximately 2 to 3 hours per week: one weekly governance call, async feedback on change requests, and quarterly sign-off reviews. We handle everything else.
Real Retainer Story
How Swan turned spreadsheet sprawl into a trusted Power BI estate
A multi-entity manufacturer running Microsoft Dynamics NAV with 10,000+ items, finance buried in Excel, and reports nobody trusted. Twelve months later: one semantic model, certified close, and a retainer that never wakes the Chief Financial Officer at midnight.
Manufacturing · 10,000+ items
Swan
Multi-entity manufacturer on Microsoft Dynamics NAV with finance, production, sales, and inventory reporting requirements across an expanding catalogue.
Engagement
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 upgrade plus Power BI build, then transitioned to a managed services retainer with quarterly model reviews.
Twelve Month Timeline
Month 0 · baseline
Excel sprawl, duplicate measures, no owner
Finance running monthly close on Excel exports from Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Three versions of revenue. Reports refreshed manually by the financial planning and analysis analyst.
Month 1 · onboarding
Tenant audit, runbook drafting, named pod assigned
Workspace inventory, gateway map, capacity assessment, dataset lineage delivered. Pod includes engineer, architect, and lead.
Month 3 · semantic model
One certified model, finance and production aligned
Single semantic model spanning finance, sales, inventory, and production. Versioned DAX, measure dictionary signed off by the Finance Director.
Month 6 · operations dashboards
Production line dashboards, hourly refresh, mobile
Floor managers see live on-time-in-full and throughput on tablets. Microsoft Teams alerts when defect rate or throughput cross thresholds.
Month 9 · close compression
Month-end close moves from 11 days to 4 days
Certified close pack auto-generated on day 1. Reconciliation matches general ledger to the dollar. Chief Financial Officer signs off without spreadsheet swap.
Month 12 · steady state
100% refresh success, 0 measure disputes in the quarter
Retainer running quietly. Quarterly strategic review identifies next priorities: artificial intelligence Copilot pilot and supplier scorecard.
Close speed
64%
faster month-end close cycle
Refresh success
99.6%
over rolling 90 days
Items reported
10,000+
catalogue items in one model
Measure disputes
0
last reporting quarter
Why Redefine Over A Generic Partner
Most retainers sell you hours. We sell you an estate that runs itself
Three differences show up on the very first invoice and never go away. Read them. Then ask the other implementation partners on your shortlist to explain how they meet the same bar.
01
Named pod, not a ticket queue
Every retainer is delivered by the same four people: senior engineer, architect, project lead, governance reviewer. You meet them in week one. You keep them.
Typical partner
Round-robin ticket pool. You get whoever is free.
Redefine
Same four people every week. They know your model.
Why it matters
Context is the cost. We never re-learn your business.
Inside The Pod
Senior engineer
DAX, M, model tuning
Solution architect
Capacity, governance, design
Project lead
Backlog, weekly call, communications
Governance reviewer
Certification, audit trail
02
Published service-level agreement. Refunded if missed.
Priority 1 response in 4 hours. Priority 2 in one business day. Priority 3 in 3 days. Miss the service-level agreement, the affected month is credited automatically. No emails, no debate.
| Severity | Definition | Response service-level agreement | Resolution target | Credit if missed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Critical report or dataset down, business impact | 4 hours | Same business day | 15% of month |
| P2 | Refresh failure or incorrect measure, limited scope | 1 business day | 2 business days | 10% of month |
| P3 | Enhancement, new visual, new measure request | 3 business days | In sprint | 5% of month |
03
Monthly transparency report you can hand to your auditor
Refresh log, service-level agreement performance, hours used, hours remaining, change log per measure, capacity utilisation. One document. Sent on the first business day.
Inside the monthly retainer report
- Refresh success rate by workspace
- Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3 incidents and service-level agreement performance
- Engineer hours used and remaining
- Measure change log with author and reason
- Capacity utilisation and license posture
Adjacent Power BI Services
Pair your retainer with the right next step
Related Services
Already on the retainer? Clients on the retainer also use
- Power BI support servicesReactive ticketed help for teams not yet ready for a full retainer.
- Power BI service-level agreement supportStand-alone service-level agreement agreements for organisations with internal business intelligence capacity.
- Power BI audit servicesOne-time deep audit of your tenant before retainer onboarding.
- Power BI health check5-day diagnostic that scopes your retainer requirements precisely.
Next Step Pairings
Pricing, return on investment, and onboarding paths
- Power BI managed services pricingDetailed retainer tiers, included hours, and procurement-friendly terms.
- Managed services onboardingThe 30-day onboarding workflow that gets your retainer running.
- Power BI return on investment assessmentQuantify the cost of the status quo before signing.
- Power BI migration servicesMove off SSRS, Tableau, or legacy tools before going on retainer.
- Power BI consulting servicesStrategy and roadmap before you commit to a retainer model.
- Back to Power BI services hubEvery Redefine Power BI service in one place.
Procurement Questions, Answered
The seven questions your Chief Financial Officer will ask
Retainers start at $6,400 per month and scale based on three inputs: number of reports under care, total daily refreshes, and reserved engineer hours. Minimum 90 days, then month-to-month with 30 days notice. Pricing is line item, not a slab.
We support what exists. Onboarding starts with a tenant audit so we inherit your reports, gateways, and capacity exactly as they stand. Rebuilds are only proposed where the model is materially blocking governance or performance, and always as a separate, optional project.
You see the burn rate in the weekly call so it is never a surprise. Unused hours roll over for 60 days. Overage is billed at the agreed hourly rate after you approve it in writing. We never auto-extend an invoice.
Engineers work inside your Power BI tenant under named accounts you provision. We never extract data to our environment. Access uses multi-factor authentication, conditional access policies you control, and is revoked the day the retainer ends.
A generic managed service provider keeps the platform up. We keep your reports trusted. That means DAX review, semantic model stewardship, measure dictionaries, certified datasets, and rebuild work, none of which a typical infrastructure-only managed service provider can perform.
Everything we build belongs to you: PBIX files, models, measure dictionary, runbooks, lineage, monthly reports. Offboarding includes a 30-day handover with a written report on tenant state and recommended next owner profile.
Yes to all three. Retainers cover classic Power BI Pro and premium per user, Fabric workspaces, dataflows generation 2, semantic models, paginated reports, and Copilot adoption. We help you decide what to migrate, what to leave, and what to pilot.
Honest Fit Check
Tick the ones that match. If three or more we are a fit
No sales call required to answer this. If you tick two or fewer, a retainer is overkill and we will say so.
Good Fit Signals
A Redefine retainer probably makes sense if
- You have more than 20 Power BI reports in production
- Finance, operations, or commercial teams depend on dashboards weekly
- Your business intelligence workload is more than one person but not a team
- You have had a refresh fail at the wrong time in the last 90 days
- Two reports disagree and nobody knows which is right
- An auditor or finance committee is starting to ask hard questions
Not Yet Signals
Pick another path if
- You have fewer than 5 production reports today
- You are early in evaluation and have not bought Power BI yet
- You already have a full internal business intelligence team running smoothly
- You only need one report rebuilt, no ongoing work expected
If this is you
Try a one-off audit or a support package instead.
Your Fit Score
Book A Scoping Call0 / 6 good fit signals
Tick the boxes that match your situation.
Not sure? Tell us your situation and we will be straight with you.
Book Your Retainer Scoping Call
30 minutes. A clear yes or no.
Tell us a little about your Power BI estate. We will respond within 48 hours with either a scoped retainer proposal, a referral to a more suitable service, or a polite no. No commitment. No pitch.
- 30-minute discovery call within 48 hours
- Scoped retainer proposal with service-level agreement in 5 days
- Named pod assigned in week one of sign-off
What does your retainer need to cover
No commitment. No pitch. Call within 48 hours · proposal within 5 days · named pod within week one of sign-off.
Brief received
We will review your situation and respond within 48 hours with either a scoping call invite or a referral to a more suitable service.
48-hour reply
5-day proposal
120+ tenants
Microsoft partner
120+ Power BI Tenants Under Active Care
Your dashboards should never be the reason a decision waits
A named pod, a published service-level agreement, and an estate that runs quietly in the background. No more 3am gateway alerts. No more month-end surprises.
Submit your estate › call within 48 hours › scoped proposal in 5 days › named pod in week one of sign-off