Business Intelligence with Power BI – Introduction

How do you use the data that your business produces?
And to what extent are your decisions data-driven?
Many organizations are already in possession of the information that could be the solution to their strategic challenges, they just don’t know it. Or even more likely, they don’t know how to sort and combine data from several unrelated sources to get something sensible from it. Let’s take the first step towards a more data-driven business!

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, practices, and applications for the collection, analysis, integration, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making. The need for correct information at the right time and in the proper format is no longer just a competitive advantage, it is a necessity for running a successful business. There are many tools for this available today and it might feel a bit overwhelming to get started. Maybe that is one of the reasons why companies often keep using old (and time-consuming) solutions like Microsoft Excel or other structures. Structures that are often heavily dependent on certain people, sensitive to errors by the human factor and, last but not least, difficult to efficiently share with the organization.

One of the available tools is Power BI, a product from Microsoft that is easy to learn and get started with. Power BI is well integrated with other tools, like Microsoft Excel, and lets you quickly get up to speed and work smoothly together with your existing solutions. In other words – you’ll be up and running, making well-informed decisions right away!

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be found in an Excel spreadsheet or a collection of cloud-based or on-premise data warehouses. Power BI connects all your data sources and brings your data to life by the aid of customizable dashboards and reports. It lets you transform transaction and observation data into detailed images and reports so you can visualize, detect, and focus on what is important, then easily share your insights with your organization. You will go from data to insights in only a few minutes, stay informed, discover trends immediately, and ultimately be able to take your business one step further.

What is Power BI designed for?

Power BI is designed to help you create, share, and use business insights in the way that best suits you and your role. For example, you can use Power BI to create reports for your team on customer engagement statistics and follow the inventory and manufacturing process on a real-time dashboard. The sales department might want to monitor their sales quotas and stay up to date on new information about potential customer leads. All that and much more is easily accessible through Power BI. Below we’ve listed some examples of areas where you can quickly simplify and improve your business using a BI tool that combines and analyses your data instead of you working with unrelated data sources.

Five ways Business Intelligence can improve your business:

• Cost efficiency through automation of processes and flows, you can quickly identify abnormalities.
• Increased revenue by customer insights and improved business models.
• Personalization and targeted marketing.
• Better informed decisions and stronger predictions.
• Forecasts of e.g. market developments, machine maintenance, and much more.

Using a BI tool like Power BI enables employees at all levels of the organization to make confident decisions based on facts, rather than opinions or gut feeling (read our article about HiPPO’s here), using updated analysis. That way you can start building a company culture driven by data and create favorable conditions for increased competitiveness, higher efficiency rates, lower costs, and in the end greater profits.