Making decisions is hard. It is even harder when an organization grows, and every decision affects many people. There are several challenges associated with data derived decision making:
- How to get data to make decisions
- How to get data timely for decisions to have impact
- How to present data to make decisions intuitive
- How to find data that has correlation to results
- How to get decisions right the first time
Business intelligence solution provides insights into past and current performance of a company so that you can make informed decisions.
Get data for decision making. Accounting data is usually readily available, but that data is about historic results not about current performance. ERP applications do not support flexible formatting of data or integrating that data with outside operational databases. The earlier data is available for decision making, the better.
Businesses collect data at every stage of their processes and most devices have some kind of “smart” inside. The real challenge is to get data out of those systems without compromising security and device warranty. It requires cooperation between several partners to collect data to include in business intelligence systems.
Simple reporting solutions can be implemented solely on Power BI, but integration of several databases and data ingestion procedures usually requires implementation of Azure Synapse data warehouse.
Get timely data for decision making. Every business has ways to evaluate their performance whether it is income statement or some other report. Business intelligence provides flexible data ingestion that can be automated so that business processes are visible as they happen. Primend Data Engineers can automate Power BI and Azure Synapse data warehouse procedures for importing data and for cleaning it up for reports.
Clean data for reporting. Every database keeps its data in a different format based on its design guidelines. Operational databases and data structures within them are optimized for presenting on record and stuff associated with that record. Reporting databases must be optimized for and have data structures that makes applying filters for millions of records a breeze. Therefore, format and structure usually need transformation into as few tables as practically feasible to improve filtering speeds. Often it also requires calculation of additional fields that in operational database are calculated within application but would make Power BI report too slow if calculated while applying filters or presenting data to users.
Present data for decision making. Reporting software has always been tools of trade for top managers. Top managers use reporting tools to find relationships between employee performance and company results, to find and present trends and to communicate business strategy.
Current best practice recommends presenting performance reports straight to front line workers so that they could evaluate their performance themselves. Presenting relevant reports to front line workers cannot be a manual procedure as manual reports cannot be always up to date.
Power BI service enable automatic refresh of reports as well as reading data directly from operational databases. This way communicating performance and results to company employees is always consistent and up to date.
Performance Management
Entering data manually or checking it manually is always slow and prone to mistakes.
Integrating Power BI with other Power Platform tools like Power Automate and Power Apps enables more automated procedures for performance reporting. We can even build automated triggers based on report results so that over- or underperformance could be brought into open as soon as it happens.
Key Perfomance Indicators
Companies that delegate performance management to employees usually achieve better results. That is why managers often want to provide access to fresh performance data and measures that reflect performance quality. Power BI reporting provides access to measures and indicators that reflect performance of employees in a way that quick action can be taken to achieve better results.
Objectives Key Results
Managers can set OKR goals in Power BI service and connect those indicators to measures in Power BI Reports. This provides constant overview of how far company is on its road to superior results.
ABC Classification
Do you want to know which products and services make you money and where you lose money. ABC classification lets you choose the most important parameter that shows value and ranks all products and services by their value. A-products are the most valuable and C-products you might need to drop from your product line. ABC classification is very similar to 80/20 principle that 20% of your customers or products make you money and the rest (80%) probably lose you money.