Business Analytics: How to Benefit From Your Data

The modern workplace comes with sweeping changes and plenty of opportunities that are affecting management as well. Besides telephone conferences and meetings – whether face-to-face or virtual ones on-the-fly – keeping a close eye on the latest figures is an essential part of running a company. After all, you can’t make decisions if you don’t know what is going on. Microsoft Power BI builds a solid and transparent basis to control the company’s development – and we’ll show you how!

Power BI is Microsoft’s suite of Business Analytics Tools that provide X-ray vision of your company. Power BI allows you to integrate internal data sources or build neat dashboards and illustrative reports in a matter of minutes, which you can then share and edit with the heads of your departments, providing the information needed to make clear decisions in good time.

It really doesn’t matter whether you’re at the office or on the road, connected by tablet or smartphone – the information is always there in real-time, without any delays. Power BI also alerts you if benchmarks are at risk.

Hundreds of different data sources can be connected with Power BI – and new ones are added each month.

• Excel spreadsheets and CSV files
  
• Services like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics and many more
  
• Databases – both on-premises and in the cloud
  
• Streaming data
  
• Cloud services

There really are no limits – Power BI delivers a practical solution for any need, enabling smart decisions based on real data. We’ve selected three sectors as examples:

Manufacturing

• Make every single process stage transparent.
  
• Monitor process changes, while still keeping a close eye on the entire production.
  
• Detect supply bottlenecks before they have negative effects on production. Include your suppliers by sharing relevant dashboards and optimizing planning.
  

Services

• Everything comes down to customer satisfaction in the services sector. Share customer data with your employees in real time as a good way to increase service quality.
  
• Monitor defined revenue, margin or utilization targets to stop things going wrong in good time.
  
• You choose the dashboard filter criteria any way you like: Regions, teams, projects or individual staff members – the information you receive is always meaningful.
  

Public administration

• Make connections between municipal planning and current studies, for instance environmental reports, climate data or surveys.
  
• Ensure even more thorough and instructive preparations for budget decisions.
  

Business analytics lets you make the most of the data that your company collects. For instance, business analytics tools like Microsoft Power BI are used to make forecasts, prepare detailed plans comparing a variety of scenarios and to optimize resource allocation in complex situations. Gut instinct and intuition are simply not enough to make the right decisions.