Data plays a critical role in every aspect of a business, especially when creating operational strategies and making business decisions. Business intelligence (BI) and analytics help understand and gain control of the data that flows through the organization.
Business intelligence (BI) refers to organizations’ processes and technologies to manage, analyze, and present data for gaining actionable insights to make informed, data-driven decisions. Business intelligence helps understand what’s happening in the business, while analytics aids in making projections and predictions.
Power BI for Business
Power BI represents a holistic solution for it. It empowers you to transform large data masses into valuable insights that can be used to make better business decisions. Power BI is useful in retrieving data from multiple sources and combine it to generate tailored reports as per your requirements. These reports provide information about the business’s current state and predict where it is headed. Reports update automatically with existing data, so you don’t need to spend your time updating the same reports repeatedly.
Preparing for Changing Business Scenarios with Power BI
To stay competitive in today’s market, you need better insights into your business and collaborate on an integrated plan for the future.
With its deep-dive capabilities, Power BI also provides collaboration opportunities and aids in developing an impactful strategy while keeping in mind all the variables that can impact the growth trajectory.
Power BI allows you to set new targets, run what-if scenarios and make better decisions for maximizing your company’s performance. It enables you to take the next step and gain more insights out of the reports and dashboards. With Power BI, you can easily create scenario models and fine-tune the planning for your company’s future.
Power BI provides a combination of Modeling capabilities with dynamic visuals, giving you even more power and flexibility while viewing your organization’s data. This way, it not just helps you answer the question of “What happened?” but also answer the question “What could happen?”.
Though you can compare different scenarios in Excel, Power BI lets you do dynamically visualize organization data. . Whether you are planning year-over-year growth for a new product or making a risk assessment based on competition, Power BI provides in-depth analysis of your best, worst and ideal case scenarios at your fingertips.
Forecasting with Power BI
Power BI’s What-If parameters are of great use in the business for decision modelling. It allows you to display data trends based on scenarios and explore organization’s data that is affected by changing variable..
To understand this better, let’s take an example of a B2B service providing company. Revenue forecasting for such an organization will be built bottom-up from their internal data based on clients they have already acquired and entered into their ERP system. While this sort of forecasting would be quite accurate for the near term, it only describes a smaller portion of reality. To forecast deeper into the future, one must estimate how likely and how many projects can be won independently of the historical trend.
This is where the what-if parameter comes into play. The ‘What-If ‘ parameters make it very easy to explore and understand how the revenue forecasts can change with a mix of various future projects.
Multiple What-If parameters can also be used at once to reaffirm the projections. In this case, the number of projects, hours for each project, and rate for each project can be configured as ‘what-if’ parameters. The product of these three values is what gets added to the revenue forecast. With Power BI’s enhanced functionality, there’s no limit to how intricate you can get with the calculations.
This way, an organization can utilize What-If parameters to forecast at the macro level. They can further apply the same concept at a micro-level such as on an individual project basis, to fine-tune staffing and various other resource plans.
Conclusion
Microsoft Power BI offers many advantages at a fair price, and with its ease-of-use, it requires little upfront training. Whether it’s the correct tool for your business and how you should set it up, however, depends on your organization’s size, the sector you’re in, and how business insights are handled currently.
At Siyana Info Solutions, we believe that making the right business decisions begins with having high-quality data and making it easily accessible to support effective and timely decisions. As a company with vast experience working with Microsoft technology, Siyana has the technological expertise and years of in-field experience to help you get the most out of Microsoft Power BI. Get in touch with us today to know more about our business intelligence and data warehousing services.
