Equip your Finance organization for the future of work

Microsoft Fabric serves as the foundation for APM. Released in 2023, Fabric consolidates technical domains like data architecture and ETL with business domains like reporting and analytics. Fabric is used by 80% of the Fortune 500 and equally accessible for small businesses like OVG.

Combining familiar tools like Power BI, Power Query, Azure Data Factory, and Synapse, Fabric is the glue that helps to break down long-standing divides between technical and functional resources and brings decision-makers much closer to the data.

Fabric is an enterprise-grade data and analytics platform that can actually handle the full breadth of performance management data needs - structured and unstructured; real-time and periodic; quantitative and qualitative.

Finally, unlike most offerings, Fabric is self-serve with a 60-day free trial and can be spun without existing IT infrastructure.

Power Platform is the custom application layer for APM and one of the most well-known low-code / no-code platforms. With APM, Power Platform is used to create tailored user experiences.

Power Platform apps can serve multiple purposes, including data collection, workflows, reporting, and AI agents. They are highly accessible on either web or mobile, and scale from a few users up to hundreds of users.

With the option to leverage templates or build from scratch, Power Platform is a critical ingredient for driving broad adoption across the business, with no compromises on features or design and perhaps most importantly, no new logins, just standard Microsoft authentication.

Finally, since Fabric is open and interoperable, non-Microsoft point solutions can also be easily connected, for example to automatically create requisitions in Greenhouse from hiring requests.

APM offers multiple options for modeling, which is often where CPM tools struggle to strike an impossible balance between ease of use and functionality.

Excel is a key option, providing ultimate flexibility and usability while also scaling with native connections to Fabric, versioning coordinated via Power Apps, and automation via Power Automate, Office Scripts, and dynamic array formulas. Excel can effectively to the highest levels when used in conjunction with a platform.

For more sophisticated, high-volume, or consistent forecasting use cases such as workforce planning or demand forecasting, full-code models can be built in SQL or Python in Fabric and connected to ML models if needed. SQL and Python are much more accessible now with LLM-assisted coding.

Power Apps also play a role in modeling for areas like front-line sales forecasting which require constant updates from the field.

With options ranging from no-code to full-code, APM covers all the required modeling bases without forcing tradeoffs.

‍

‍

‍

Finally, the agentic layer is what truly sets APM apart and makes a platform-based approach shine.

Microsoft has several agentic options, including Copilot Studio for simple informational use cases, Fabric Data Agents for querying structured data, and Microsoft Foundry for sophisticated agents that can connect with various LLMs and delegate to agents for specific tasks.

If designed and built correctly, agents can already deliver data and insights directly to decision-makers in natural language.

As of December 2025, Microsoft released their Power BI MCP, which allows you to connect LLMs to Power BI semantic models, and the Fabric MCP is coming soon. The capabilities will continue to quickly improve from here.

Microsoft's agentic layer is especially compelling because Microsoft authentication and role-based access is passed natively to the agent, and it is publishable in familiar interfaces like Copilot, Teams, and Power Apps.

AI agents will soon be able to handle reporting, analysis, model-building, data manipulation, and more. APM is designed to realize the capabilities as soon as they materialize in a practical, low -risk, and cost-efficient manner.

‍