6 ways Power BI can enhance your current business processes
Let’s get straight to the point! The main benefits of Power BI are: Robustness, ease of use, affordability
Data is the new bacon! It sells like hotcakes! And why wouldn’t it?
Because it’s the catalyst to all decisions that your customers take. From being scarcely available, data is now just a click away. But, what will you do with the massive information if it’s not organized and readable?
Enter, Microsoft Power BI!
How useful is Power BI?
According to Microsoft, Power BI is a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI), which you can connect to and visualize any data. It’s easy to use and helps you gain more in-depth data insights.
In simple terms – Microsoft Power BI can help you collate, visualize, and analyze the massive amount of data that matters to your business. With this tool, you can get rid of the dull, lengthy reports and have all the necessary information ready on one page. In the form of eye-catching graphs and charts.
Its familiarity with MS Excel makes Power BI’s user interface intuitive & user-friendly. Since it’s also highly integrated with Microsoft products and the other widely used databases, it’s a remarkably flexible self-service tool that requires very little training.
The 6 benefits of Power BI for businesses
Let’s read how Power BI can benefit your current business process and enhance your ROI capabilities.
1. Time-saving & thoughtful features
Microsoft has worked hard to instill Power BI with super-useful and friendly features. And it’s constantly upgrading this data visualization tool with new and improved features.
- Power BI has loads of ready-to-use visuals that you can use depending on your data and audience.
- Its compatibility with natural language processing makes it even more flexible and user-friendly.
- Using the Q&A feature, you can put forth your need for Power BI in simple language, and Power BI will design the visuals for you.
- Features like Filters, Parameters, Bookmarks, and Visual-Zoom sliders make data presentation super intuitive for the end-users.
- For analyzing your critical data, you can use the DAX (Data Analysis Expression) language, which is similar to Excel formulae.
2. Minimal training required
Whenever the top management considers implementing a new tool, the main challenge is introducing it among the workforce. But, with Power BI, you will not have this challenge. Your staff will need to invest very minimal time & effort in training.
Power BI’s drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to grasp and learn. Your staff can generate state-of-art interactive reports without going through extensive learning materials.
Most professionals have already worked on Microsoft’s other software! So, if you have a team that knows Excel and PowerPoint, they will find working on Power BI not only much convenient but also more time-saving.
For advanced users, Power BI’s steep learning curve makes it an exciting tool. Those who want to deep dive and understand the various languages like M-Query and DAX. It’s also compatible with Python and SQL.
3. Easy sharing of reports increases team efficiency
Aggregating, analyzing, and communicating information among your employees. It is generally a big task. But with Power BI, you can get this done rather instantly. This is one of the most significant benefits of Power BI.
With Power BI Pro, sharing reports among peers can be done in real-time. No more waste of time on writing emails and no fear of data loss. You can also embed these reports on your website or SharePoint and make them available across the board.
Before we move on to the next 3 benefits of Power BI, take a look at this cool infographic from Columbus Global’s blog –
4. Real-time data enhances decision making
One of the primary advantages of Power BI is its compatibility with mobile devices. It makes your company’s critical data available at your fingertips.
Connect your report to an on-premises data gateway and access your updated reports whenever you need them. You can connect Power BI with social media sources, SQL server, or any other source from where time-sensitive data is collected.
Moreover, the interactive graphics save your time in reading the data, and you can promptly find out the high-risk factors requiring immediate attention.
Data changes every minute, so to stay ahead in the competition and make quick decisions, you will need updated information. Real-time call logs will help your customer support managers know where the bottlenecks in wait times arise and guide them to take prompt actions.
Want to make even better decisions?
Explore some of the most important business KPIs – Power BI KPIs for any business
5. Gain trust by making data available for stakeholders
Gone are the days of lengthy reports. Now, no one has the time to go through those traditional static reports. Many a time, it also negatively impacts your stakeholders’ decisions.
On the contrary, when you present your stakeholders with charts highlighting your performances, you grab their attention and win their trust.
Furthermore, using graphs, you can make large and complex data easily understood within less space. And they can access these reports from anywhere and anytime they want.
6. The most cost-effective BI solution in the market
Cost impacts decisions greatly, and this is another area where Power BI excels! Power BI Desktop is available for free. You simply need to download it and start developing dynamic reports.
You can publish dashboards on-premises with Power BI Pro, which costs $9.99 per user per month. Sharing dashboards or reports internally with other employees is as easy as sharing the link!
When you compare Power BI’s license cost with other BI software, you will find it relatively reasonable. And when you consider the set of features this tool comes with, you will find it truly worth the investment.
How are others taking advantage of Power BI?
More than 30k companies are reaping Power BI’s benefits, and most of them have employee strength of 50 to 200 employees. Gartner has also been recognizing Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and business intelligence platforms for 13 consecutive years.
Before deciding to go ahead with either Power BI or Tableau, you should definitely check out the blog below. It will help you as a business owner to further understand these tools better.
And if you need help in getting started with Power BI implementations, you can easily get in touch with our team.
