September 8th
February 22ndCoca-Cola’s Global Marketing, Commercial & PACS Intelligence (MCPI) team needed to elevate their Power BI reporting to serve diverse business users better.
By introducing Power BI, their dashboards significantly improved compared to the previous static Excel sheets, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations. However, limitations in interactivity, flexibility, and visual storytelling remained. By adopting Zebra BI, the team was able to speed up dashboard development, meet the needs of both executive and operational users, and improve overall insight delivery without disrupting existing Power BI workflows.
The Coca-Cola Company is one of the world’s most recognized brands, operating in more than 200 markets globally.
The company’s Global Marketing, Commercial & PACS Intelligence team builds enterprise-wide data and analytics capabilities and solutions that support business decisions from the C-suite to operational teams.
Our mission is simple: empower better decisions through better, stronger, and faster intelligence capabilities.
As Coca-Cola transitioned to Power BI, the benefits were clear: more agility, better data integration, and a move away from static Excel or PowerPoint reports. It lets them create more interactive dashboards with the use of filters, slicers, buttons, checkboxes, or dropdowns.
But Power BI alone didn’t meet all the needs of a large and diverse organization.
Pawel's team quickly faced an unwanted situation where they drafted the idea of the desired report or dashboard and discussed it with the developers. Often, they needed to make a compromise between what they wanted and what they could actually get without developers having to spend long hours in crafting bespoke visuals. This was not a sustainable situation for scaling Power BI reports, so Pawel started to look for add-ins, as he had some previous experience with them.
Some key limitations the team faced:
We would either trade down our expectations or increase the build time. Either way, the output was not ideal.
To bridge the gap, Coca-Cola adopted Zebra BI, a Microsoft and IBCS-certified Power BI add-in focused on advanced reporting needs, especially in business, finance, and marketing analytics.
Zebra BI offered exactly what Pawel, and his team needed: more intuitive and engaging reports on top of Power BI’s great flexibility and interactivity. At first, they were hesitant to use add-ins as they had bad experience with some uncertified ones in the past. But Zebra BI checked all the boxes with a free version to test, continuous development, and reliable support. It made it easy to keep the quality of the initial idea and the user experience while not giving a headache to the report developers.
...it's amazing and definitely a key differentiator for Zebra BI, how many additional features and functionalities you have, and you keep adding more and continuously improving.
By combining Power BI with Zebra BI’s flexibility, agility, and interactivity, Pawel’s team could suddenly go to a different level from just a dashboard with filters and drop-downs to an interactive dashboard where they could see highlighted key elements of the story. The combination of both helped them to not only analyze the data but also bring some insights up front.
Some of the key benefits included:
✅ Faster Dashboard Development
Zebra BI’s built-in automatic calculations, smart data labels, and out-of-the-box variance analysis drastically reduce the time and effort required to build dashboards. Developers no longer need to code complex DAX measures for common reporting needs.
It cuts development time dramatically—what used to take hours now takes minutes.
✅ Catering to Multiple Stakeholders with One Report
Using features like the chart slider, which allows users to switch between different chart types (e.g., bar chart, line chart, waterfall) in a single visual, the team can serve both executives and analysts without duplicating reports.
VPs may prefer high-level trends, while marketers may drill into categories, all from the same visual.
Same dataset, same report—but different users get exactly what they need.”
✅ Waterfall & Small Multiple Charts That Work
The waterfall chart was a major need, and Zebra BI tailored it specifically for finance. Zebra BI's interactive waterfall visuals work natively with Power BI data models, removing the need for workaround-heavy solutions or legacy tools.
In addition, the team frequently uses two-by-two matrix visuals (small multiples) to convey strategic insights. These are favored by senior leadership and often required for board-level presentations. Zebra BI’s small multiple functionalities support this use case out of the box, enabling fast, clean, and highly customizable layouts.
These visuals weren’t just cosmetic upgrades—they helped us tell the right story faster and better.
✅ Interactivity and Drilldowns Without Complexity
Zebra BI makes dashboards more interactive and more intuitive, offering users the ability to drill into details, focus only on key insights, and quickly understand what matters. Features like column reordering, axis scaling, and advanced filtering enhance usability without the need for developer support.
Even if someone has never used Power BI, they can still quickly pick it up and become experts if they want.
✅ Certified, Trusted, and Seamlessly Integrated
As a certified Microsoft Power BI partner, Zebra BI integrates directly into Coca-Cola’s Power BI environment without disrupting existing workflows or data models. The solution was easy to adopt with no retraining required, and end users often did not realize anything had changed.
People just started seeing the features they were asking for. They did not care it was an add-on. They were just happy it was finally there.
Zebra BI has seen strong adoption across the Coca-Cola organization. The Marketing & Commercial Intelligence team remains the heaviest user internally, powering dashboards consumed from local markets all the way to global leadership, including:
On the developer side, the reassurance of using a certified, continuously supported solution was crucial, especially after negative past experiences with unsupported or free add-ons.
The fact that Zebra BI is certified, has ongoing support, and continues to evolve was a key reason we went with it.
While the dashboards powered by Zebra BI are already the most used reporting assets in Coca-Cola’s intelligence suite, the team is not standing still.
Their next focus:
We’re focused on simplifying without losing value: helping users find insights faster, with fewer reports.
