Organizations deal with lots of data regularly. But in case you are not able to access or connect with that important data, you are not yielding anything. You are keeping your organizations away from getting the value. This is where Microsoft Power BI comes into play. It helps you solve this problem of Data visualization and sharing on time. In this blog, you can find some of the best Power BI Use Cases and examples that can help in your business.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is the business intelligence component of the Microsoft Power Platform, enabling users to visualize data from Dynamics NAV or Business Central instances along with many other systems, including Facebook, Google Analytics, SharePoint, and website analytics.

One of the biggest advantages of this tool is that the desktop version of the software is free, which means even small businesses on a tight budget can benefit from the visualized data.

Now let’s understand what Power BI service and its types are.

Power BI services

Power BI service is a secure Microsoft-hosted cloud service that lets users view dashboards, reports, and Power BI apps — a type of content that combines related dashboards and reports — using a web browser or via mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.

There are three types of Power BI that you will see on the Power BI pricing page:  Power BI Free or Desktop, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Check out our blog post: Free vs. Paid Power BI

How can use the Power BI service for my organization? What are the popular Power BI use cases?

Organizations usually ask us how we can use Power BI easily or what kind of visually appealing dashboards and reports can be created to make informed business decisions? Beyond Intranet is a Microsoft Gold partner company which is working on BI and data analytics tools and technology for the last more than a decade.

We have developed several intuitive dashboards and reports which are consumed every day with different people in the organization playing various job roles.

Here are a few of the use-cases where Power BI dashboards and reports can make a difference in the angle of seeing data.

1.Resource Management

2. Financial reporting

3. Sales scorecard

4. Claims, billing, and collection report

5. Inventory optimization

1. Resource Management

We had a leading consumer electronics manufacturer as our client who had multiple productions and device manufacturing sites in various geographical locations.

They needed a Custom BI dashboard to make better decisions on task and resource allocation. We suggested they use Power BI instead of the usual SSRS reports because of the strong visualization capabilities of Power BI. We used the Power Query and Power Pivot in Excel to generate the report. To get a complete overview of resource demand and allocation, we can track key KPIs like:

1. Number of open projects and resources allocated

2. Resources with task count

3. Skills of the resources

4. Project completion percentage

2. Financial reporting dashboards

No matter whatever business you are in, generating revenue and profit is probably your organization’s chief KPI. Tracking your finances with longstanding excel sheets or logbooks is not only difficult but confusing also. You manually keep updating the figures in the cells and eventually tend to lose track. Modern-day businesses have therefore switched to the powerful data visualization tool called Power BI.

We recently developed a PoC of a Financial reporting dashboard for one of our medical devices’ clients. With the unified dashboard, the company could easily understand their complex financial spreadsheets. The got the bird’s eye view of what’s going on with their revenue statements and could take quick decisions on cash flow and product wise sales summary data.

3. Sales Scorecard

The Sales Scorecard is one way we help people to monitor the pulse of their business. The scorecard or the dashboard helps the sales team to have a high-level understanding of what happened with the business the previous day and where things are tracking for the year.

Managers can view the complete scorecard of their team and apply required filters like comparing zone wise sales team performance.

They can slice and dice reports by looking on to the individual team member’s scorecard, product-wise performance, or even geography or time-wise sale. Sales and marketing scorecards are required in almost all types of businesses and we know that customizing it as per your need is equally important to give required output. We are open to any time of customization as well as providing you the self-service Power BI dashboards too.

4. Power BI for Claims, billing, and collection report

Speedy and effective claims handling is the basis for great customer management. Power BI can help to improve the claims management process in any industry dealing with claims. The analysis helps identify trends in claims, loss patterns, and helps reduce the risk of fraud and ineffectiveness.

The claims handlers’ team can optimize the claims and billing process, minimizing losses, and increasing customer satisfaction by speeding up the entire process. Other than this, claim cancellation and delay in the collection are two major issues that need to be addressed immediately to keep the customers satisfied and to bring the required efficiency in the process.

5. Power BI for Better Inventory Optimization

Power BI help identify stock turns, inventory-to-purchase ratio, slow-moving stock, and gross margin return on investment (GMROI) by manufacturer, device, or location.

Through these granular reports created on Power BI, the Inventory head can easily identify how much stock is available for a product. They can do the required sorting of the stock with the manufacturing and expiry dates, prices, and batch numbers.

Power BI’s inventory management dashboards provide:

• Granular reports on Overstock, Understock, and deadstock
• Insights into product/ raw material purchases and re-stocking / re-ordering
• Plans to eliminate the deadstock and bring overall efficiency with stocking
• Reports to track and monitor inventory in multiple warehouses.
• Procurement budgeting and planning across multiple warehouses

Power BI Use Cases: Final Thoughts

If you are considering the implementation of any BI platform for your business, we would advise you to at least give Microsoft Power BI by Microsoft. If anything, you can use the free desktop version which also has a lot of potentials. Even if you are facing any difficulty assessing the platform, we are here to help with our Power BI consulting services. We are your full-service BI solutions partner, assisting through all stages of the BI process from exploration to development, deployment, training, ongoing support, and ultimately your continued success.

To learn more about Power BI or our Power BI consulting Services, click the link below or contact us—we would love to help.

The post Power BI Use Cases appeared first on Beyond Key.

How smart are your organizations’ decisions? Do you have the right information to make those decisions in the first place? To help you improve the quality of your enterprises’ decision-making process, we reviewed the top four business intelligence (BI) tools on the market today. Below you can find the benefits, features, and challenges for the top four BI tools on the market today (Power BI Vs Tableau Vs Qlik Vs Domo).

What is a business intelligence tool?

Before we discuss the four main BI tools below, it is important to take a moment to understand why these tools can help your organization.

Business Intelligence is part of data analytics. BI uses data to help organizations make smarter decisions based on past results. Because of this focus on the past, business intelligence is often called descriptive analytics since it describes what already happened in the organization.

The main benefit of BI tools like the ones below is they aggregate the data in a central visual dashboard. Businesses can share these dashboards with their management teams as reports.

Many BI tools today have expanded past the basic visual dashboards they were in the past to include predictive analytics features. Predictive analytics predicts an enterprise’s future events based on past events and artificial intelligence. As organizations send more data to their business intelligence solution, its power of prediction increases.

By looking at the organizations’ story, executives can decide the best course of action. As BI tools improve, they learn how to help executives improve their decisions. This is called prescriptive analytics.

Prescriptive analytics examines the possible outcomes from each recommendation and then offers what the computer believes is the best outcome possible. We have done a detailed comparison on Power BI Vs Tableau Vs Domo Vs Qlik on the best business intelligence tools. What are their pros and cons?

The BI tools below can help organizations make smarter decisions based on descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

Comparing Business Intelligence Tools Power BI Vs Tableau Vs Domo

Domo

Description– Like the other BI tools we discuss below, Domo can integrate data from over 1,000 various sources. Organizations can turn these data sources into workflows and applications to improve decision-making. It is no surprise the US government started to use this tool to understand the spread of COVID-19.

The platform includes features like:

• 150+ interactive chart types
• Bi-directional connectors offer instant insights to all users
• Connects with cloud storage (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Box, etc.)
• Realtime alerts and notifications
• Android and iOS apps
• API, SSO, and Connector integrations
• Export data into CSV and XLSX files
• HIPPA compliant
• Certified content (find official data sources organization uses)
• Custom Data Encryption

Benefits- Domo has a powerful drag-and-drop ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool. Their ETL was a major reason JDRF, a non-profit we work with, chose Domo. The non-profit appreciated the platforms’ live visualizations and ETL capabilities.

Challenges– While they have over 1,000 different connectors, many consumers found them difficult to use without aid. Additionally, some users complained about a lackluster customer service experience.

Qlik

Description– with over 50,000 global customers, Qlik focuses on how to create easy-to-use, end-to-end data solutions such as QlikView® and Qlik Sense®.

QlikView is a classical business intelligence solution that supplies a visual dashboard for businesses to view their data. Qlik Sense is a cloud-based solution that uses machine intelligence to improve the quality of data analytics.

Benefits– We discussed the difference above between descriptive and predictive analytics. The AI abilities on QlikSense are predictive and prescriptive. They learn based on user activity to produce insights and solutions.

Other benefits of using this tool include:

• Interactive dashboards
• Server-side development
• API access
• Cloud-based solution. No local installs
• Chart suggestions based on data and activity (AI)
• Mobile access
• Export and Share dashboards/data as Excel, PDF, or image files

Challenges- Qlik does not have a strong customer support model for current clients. Because some of the features have a steep learning curve, this makes it difficult for inexperienced users. Qlik dashboards are hard to embed into other services because of their distinctive look. For BI tools, integration is a chief concern.

Power BI

Description– Part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, Power BI gives everyone in an organization the ability to design applications and manage data without having a master’s degree in IT. Furthermore, Power BI presents information in a specific format.

Benefit– Because Microsoft owns Power BI, it is a core part of the Microsoft product ecosystem.

For example, we helped an Australian family-focused NGO set up a Power App where remote team members could enter valuable data about program attendees. We connected the Power App to Power BI, so they could analyze each program’s success in one place.

Organizations value the powerful data visualizations that help them improve their decision-making. Other benefits and features include:

• Better, flexible insights
• Reduced Cost (Available in E5 plan or as a standalone tool)
• Built-in AI capabilities
• Excel, Teams, SharePoint, and other SaaS integrations
• Prebuilt and custom data connectors
• Enterprise level security and data loss prevention capabilities
• No or little technical experience needed
• Automate data prep and reporting processes
• iOS, Android, and Windows mobile apps
• Certifications (new feature)

Challenges- While anyone can use Power BI, there is still a learning curve. Often, it helps to have Power BI Consultants. Additionally, the basic standalone pricing starts at $9.99/mos. However, some of the advanced premium versions are too expensive for many SMBs.

Also, complex business use cases might not be able to use this program due to the table relationships, rigid formulas, and interrelated Microsoft 365 tools.

Tableau

Description- Like the other BI tools we mentioned above, Tableau transforms data into actionable insights. They have a great tool for creating ad hoc analyses and visual dashboards.

Benefits– The Tableau Creator has great visualization features and is easy-to-use. They started offering free services for a year to teachers and students with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other features and benefits include:

• Easy-to-use drag & drop products
• Integrations with spreadsheets, databases, Hadoop, and cloud services
• Web and mobile dashboard share features
• Data preparation and governance add-on

Challenges– Unlike the other BI tools, Tableau can only do reporting. They do not have any ETL features. Therefore, they are not as dynamic when it comes to data transformation.

Final Thoughts on Power BI Vs Tableau Vs Domo Vs Qlik

Most BI tools have several basic features in common. However, there are differences. For example, Power BI integrates better with the Microsoft ecosystem. Additionally, if you want more advanced predictive analytics features then you should consider Qlik or Power BI.

The key is to determine how these tools can help your organization. If you are not sure, let us help. Schedule a free 1-hour call with a Power BI expert at our organization, and we can work with you to find the best business intelligence tool for your needs.

The post Compare the Top BI Tools: Power BI vs Tableau vs Qlik vs Domo appeared first on Beyond Key.