Power BI offers many benefits for businesses. It is powerful and can handle large amounts of data. It can be used to create visually immersive reports and dashboards that give businesses a near-live 360-degree view of their entire business in a single dashboard.

Power BI is an ideal solution for small businesses because it is powerful to handle large amounts of data and can be used to create visually immersive reports and dashboards that give small businesses a near-live 360-degree view of their entire business in a single dashboard. Additionally, Power BI is cloud-based, which means that small businesses do not need to invest in expensive hardware or software to use it.

Microsoft is a leader of Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform.

Where can help an external consultant

External consultants can help in your Power BI projects in your organization. They can help you identify the right data sources, design effective reports and dashboards, identify areas where Power BI can be used more effectively within your organization. They bring expertise and experience to your Power BI project and can design and implement your solution more efficiently and effectively. Consultants can help you follow best practices for Power BI development and avoid common pitfalls while ensuring that your solution is scalable and maintainable.

Although Microsoft aimed to make certain basic reports without any special training during the design of Power BI Desktop, the precise and quick implementation of solution answers effectively to the business needs and the appearance of further data connections and integrations requires professionals with experience and knowledge, especially in the following areas:

• Data modeling: Data modeling is the process connecting data sources and designing the structure of your data in Power BI. This requires expertise in database design and data analysis.
• DAX coding: DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula language used in Power BI to create custom calculations and aggregations. This requires expertise in programming and data analysis.
• Visualization design: Visualization design is the process of creating effective and engaging visualizations in Power BI. This requires expertise in graphic design and data analysis.
• Performance optimization: Performance optimization is the process of improving the speed and efficiency of your Power BI solution. This requires expertise in database design, query optimization, and data analysis.

Typical use cases

Sales and marketing analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your sales and marketing data to identify trends, opportunities, and areas for improvement. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your sales performance, customer behavior, and more.

Financial analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your financial data to gain insights into your company’s financial performance. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your revenue, expenses, cash flow, and more.

Human resources analytics: You can use Power BI to track the performance of your human resources teams. For example, you can create dashboards and reports that show employee turnover rates, headcount, performance metrics, and more.

Supply chain analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your supply chain data to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your inventory levels, order fulfillment rates, shipping times, and more.

Healthcare analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your healthcare data to gain insights into patient outcomes, treatment effectiveness, and more. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your patient satisfaction scores, readmission rates, mortality rates, and more

Education analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your education data to gain insights into student performance, enrollment trends, and more. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your student retention rates, graduation rates, test scores, and more.

Retail analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your retail data to gain insights into customer behavior, inventory levels, and more. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your sales performance, customer demographics, and more.

Manufacturing analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your manufacturing data to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your production rates, quality metrics, and more.

IT analytics Power BI: can help you analyze your IT data to gain insights into your company’s technology infrastructure. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your network performance, server uptime, security metrics, and more.

Social media analytics: Power BI can help you analyze your social media data to gain insights into customer sentiment, engagement rates, and more. You can use Power BI to create dashboards and reports that show your social media performance across different platforms.

Service maintenance analytics: You can use Power BI to track the performance of your service maintenance teams. For example, you can create dashboards and reports that show the number of service requests completed, the average time to complete a request, and more.

IT consultant analytics: You can use Power BI to track the performance of your IT consultants. For example, you can create dashboards and reports that show the utilization rate of resources, the number of tickets closed, the average time to resolve a ticket, and more.

Examples of Power BI reports:

[1] The on-premises version of Power BI is called Power BI Report Server. It is a server that allows you to host and share Power BI reports within your organization’s firewall. Power BI Report Server is ideal for organizations that need to keep their data on-premises due to regulatory or compliance requirements. There are some disadvantages to PBI service, like limited data sources, collaboration, scalability and PBI service entering cost is lower (Report Server needs Power BI Premium plan).

Data, in theory, is like Mathematics. It’s pure, unbiased, unquestionable, non-negotiable, and simple. It’s neutral. But in practice, data is what you use it for and how you use it. The complexity, the diversity, the structure, and usability of it depends on its sources, its users, and the output formats that you choose.

Working together with our client, we saw how different needs, different professional experiences and expectations, different views and different datasets from various sources can increase the complexity and make reporting challenging. Our client’s various business units, in different countries, with managers coming from completely different backgrounds used their data in distinctive ways – serving their specific needs.

In business, just as in life, the challenge is usually to simplify things as much as possible, to synchronize processes, to avoid clutter, and reduce superfluous activities to reach maximum efficiency.

Our client has offices in various countries, including Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary, and works across three different business units – at different stages of their lifecycle. Their reporting was already well-advanced, with clear expectations and reports that serve business planning and forecasting: to find the harmonized view of the various data sources. Having a sales-oriented mindset, the focus was on revenue and pipeline data, with a lower priority on costs.

What we achieved

With our project the aim was to create a consolidated profit and loss report that delivers a near-real-time solution for all business units, all countries with different legal and taxation needs – serving the reporting needs of the CEO, the management, and the mid-management equally.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge was to find the right way of consolidating the data that can serve all the different professional needs (different countries, different legal entities, different business units with different business goals) and cater to the familiarity of previous experiences.

The expected reporting solution had to serve multiple purposes.

First, it had to serve all the potential different levels, from the CEO to management, going various levels down to the business units. This meant to provide the option to show the bigger picture view to display trends, while also offering the possibility to drill down to specific granularities. Beyond the business planning, the reporting structure had to support the work of controlling, the CFO, and the COO – and to serve as the base for the quarterly performance review of the management and the teams.

Secondly, we had to create a structure that can show the changes in past, and that can help forecast the future (typically until the end of actual fiscal year); that also allows to compare achieved and forecasted performance to business plan (created before every fiscal year). For comparability and more precise planning, we needed to facilitate highlighting changes and deviations between different reporting periods.

And lastly, our client being an already established company, the report structure, and the report categories within had to be aligned to the company’s established standard of P&L report, with given categories via a complex rule set.

We have worked with various data sources, 3 instances of ERP, CRM and HRMS systems, the data from accounting and payroll systems of 5 legal entities in different countries around Europe, and the offline dataset of detailed yearly business planning.

Implementation

In the project we used the following technologies:

• Microsoft Power BI
• Microsoft Power Automate
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Data connections: SQL Server, Firebird, REST API, Excel, SharePoint lists

What we implemented, as the result of the project, was a customized, filterable aggregated report-system with deep drill down functions for measuring, forecasting, and comparing with the business plan for the following categories:

• direct business units’ revenue (software/service),
• revenue related cost (software/service),
• staff costs (delivery, sales management and for corporate positions),
• indirect cost
  • cost of administration and finance,
  • cost of operating HR,
  • cost of infrastructure and IT,
  • cost of management,
  • cost of marketing,
  • depreciation and amortization,
  • taxes and
• profitability on different levels: direct margin on business units, EBIDTA, EBIT, profit after tax.

All items contain (1) actual data, from invoices and other accounting items, (2) forecast from orders (agreed delivery in contracts), and (3) forecast from sales pipeline weighted with probability. The trends are displayed over periods.

All report pages can be filtered by period (month/quarter/year), business unit and lower units and by different categories. Beyond this, all specific pages can be filtered by projects, customers, vendors, products, and services type.

As a unique feature, reports can be compared in detail with previous versions. The changes are highlighted week-by-week, so the group management and the business management can see the items responsible for the change in revenue and/or cost.

Data updates are made in an identical structure staging environment where the controlling team and the CFO review and approve changes before publishing them to the management.

Result

As a result of the implementation, our client now has a continuously updated report for overall financial performance, as well as for detailed metrics. The current reporting system is accepted as single source of truth within the company’s leadership and used for the regular management review to set and measure individual and overall business goals.

This project proved how data can serve as the go-to-solution in multiple areas of a given company, even if the diversity creates a complexity that seems impossible to handle.

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