Managers are faced with making critical business decisions every day, and it is hard to do with limited or incomplete information. In today’s digital economy, the reality is, companies already accumulate massive amounts of data that can be used for their competitive advantage. All they need to do is to learn how to make sense of their business data.
That’s where Business Intelligence comes in. BI empowers you to make informed business decisions by allowing you to analyze data quickly and easily. A cloud-based, self-service BI tool such as Microsoft Power BI comes free in your Microsoft 365 subscription that you can already utilize in transforming into a data-driven organization.
So how does Microsoft Power BI help you solve your everyday business reporting and analysis challenges? Read on to find out the key issues it can help you fix now.
Managing poor performance
Without a tool to help you track your overall business performance, you rely on inaccurate data or gut feel to manage your organization. You won’t be able to confidently tackle poor performance without accurate data to allow you to pinpoint your areas of improvement.
Having Power BI allows you to gain complete insight through dashboards, KPIs and real-time access to company data. It can allow you to create accountability within your organization by providing thorough reports so you can align business activities to strategic goals.
Compiling reports from different systems
A lot of time is lost, and energy is wasted when your people have to compile reports from your ERP, CRM and other custom line of business applications. So much time is dedicated into merging, cleansing and reporting data in spreadsheets that are often questioned for its accuracy as it typically doesn’t reflect up to the minute updates of your data.
Microsoft Power BI allows you to run reports and analysis regardless of the source or platform. It easily connects to Microsoft’s applications (SharePoint, SQL Server, Azure, Exchange, Microsoft Dynamics, etc) and even non-Microsoft platforms (Salesforce, Google Analytics, OData, MySQL, etc). It allows you to unify your extensive data into a single view, all in real-time.
Reliance on IT to generate reports
Previously, only IT understands how to develop custom reports in traditional BI tools. This has made it difficult for many end-users to get to the reports that they need at the time they need it. This is both unproductive, time-consuming and not sustainable in the long term.
Today, Microsoft has democratized its tools with Power BI being a self-service, cloud-based business intelligence application. Gone are the days when managers have to wait in line for their IT to whip up the reports that they need. Power BI now allows your people to run their own reports and analysis when they need it, how they need it.
Losing market share
In the current market conditions where competition is fiercer than ever before, any business would not be able to afford to lose their customers. With manual reporting, managers would have to wait for the end of the month or quarter to make an analysis, but this shouldn’t be the case most especially when you are losing your market share.
Microsoft Power BI can arm you with valuable insight into your customer behaviour and profile or which products are sold more in specific locations. It can provide you with daily insight so you can rapidly make adjustments to act on unpredictable situations or market demands.
Final words
Done right, Business Intelligence can help you to gain insight into your organization’s overall performance and can assist in making faster, informed decisions. You can already kick start your way towards having a data-driven culture in your organization through the Power BI already included in your Microsoft 365 subscription.
If you need guidance with customizing reports in Power BI, get in touch with us here. Our team of Power BI consultants can provide you with a free demo and consultation to get you started.