Power BI is the Business Intelligence component of the Microsoft Power Platform which provides us appealing dashboards and reports. These dashboards can easily be created using simple drag and drop functions. Many organizations face challenges with Power BI report performance while accessing these reports. Our Power BI team has researched a lot on improving and optimizing the Power BI report performance issues using tools like the Performance Analyzer tool.

What is the Performance Analyzer tool?

Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is a tool that creates graphs and data tables of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events that are recorded by Windows Performance Recorder (WPR) or Xperf. WPA can open any event trace log (ETL) file for analysis.

Steps to use the Performance Analyzer tool.

Let us walk through the steps of how we can use the Performance analyzer tool to analyze the performance of Power BI reports.

In Performance Analyzer, we can identify how the report elements, such as visuals and DAX formulas, are performing. We can see and record logs that measure how each of your report elements performs when users interact with them in MS (milliseconds).

Duration (MS) = the difference between a start and end timestamp for each operation.

Now, let’s deep dive into how the Performance Analyzer tool works.

Remember, this feature is available on Power BI Desktop only

Let’s get started.

1.Open your Report (pbix file).

2.Select the View In the Show area of the View ribbon, you can select the checkbox next to Performance Analyzer to display the Performance Analyzer pane.

Once we click on Performance Analyzer, the below image pane will appear.

3. Click on ‘Start recording’.  Clicking on “Start recording” this will be in running mode.

4. Start doing your operations on the report where you are facing issues and all other required areas to check for report performance.

Keep in mind, any actions you take in the report are displayed and logged in the Performance Analyzer pane.

So, each time you click on a visual, move a slicer, or interact in any other way, Performance Analyzer immediately displays the performance results in its pane.

5) Once you are done with the report element review you can select the Stop button which is now enabled.

6) Now all recorded information can be viewed directly in the pane or you can export it in JSON format.

Recording Analysis

Performance Analyzer recording analysis will be done on the following categories:

• DAX query– If a DAX query is required, this is the time between the visual sending the query, and for Analysis Services to return the results.
• Visual display– Time required for the visual to draw on the screen, including time required to retrieve any web images or geocoding.
• Other– time required by the visual for preparing queries, waiting for other visuals to complete, or performing other background processing.

You can identify the duration (in milliseconds ) for each element.

Final Thoughts

The Performance Analyzer feature is the perfect tool to use if you have slow models. We have put together all the steps you need to follow within Performance Analyzer to boost the performance of your BI models and reports.

If you face any difficulties or issues with controlling the performance of your BI reports, feel free to get in touch with us. At Beyond Key, we have a team of skilled Power BI consultants who can help you quickly resolve such issues in no time. Simply write to us at contact@beyondkey.com to reach us.

Also, visit our website to know more about our Power BI consulting services and offerings.

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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.

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