I do have a general question about BI reporting with Microsoft SSRS. My company uses MS SQL Server as RDBMS and also has MS Analysis Services. The goal of my company is to establish a consistent definition of Key Performance Indicators for all production facilities and displaying these as a report in SSRS. In the future we also would like to use MS PowerBI for further analysis.

To achieve this goal it is necessary to re-name and do some calculations with the source data from certain PLC systems to reach a common format and join it with data from our ERP - system.

Therefore my question: how is it possible to keep a common data base throughout the company, which offers the possibility for self-service BI? Do other companies normally develop OLAP-cubes for these purposes or is a "materialized view" in the Warehouse getting to a similar result at the end?