Your business is generating data nearly every minute, from the path that visitors take on your website before contacting you to which of your work applications employees are engaging with the most.
Microsoft Power BI can help your business soar by allowing you to see your company from more data-based vantage points, but only if you’re using tools that can offer comprehensive data analytics.
If you’re not taking advantage of the insights you can gain from all your data, you could not only be missing out on actionable intel about your company, you could be making the wrong decisions about how to grow your sales because you only have half of the pertinent information.
Businesses that take advantage of data insights through analytics grow at an average of over 30% every year.
It’s estimated that every person will generate 1.7 megabytes of data per second by 2020, which begs the question, “How can you capture and analyze all that data in a meaningful way?”
That’s where business intelligence dashboards come in, and one of the most powerful is Microsoft Power BI.
Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) is an application that can connect to a wide range of data sources and distill that data into visually engaging and informative reports that allow companies to make fast, informed decisions.
The Importance of Multi-Data Views
What happens if you’re making decisions that don’t include all the available information? You could end up making the wrong one that hurts your business rather than helps it.
For example, say that your damaged shipment costs have been increasing and you’re trying to figure out why. You look at the number of damaged shipments before and after you switched to a lower-priced carrier last year, and see that while during the first 6 months, there was no change, over the last several month's complaints of damages from customers have risen significantly.
You assume that the shipper must have gone downhill, so you switch back to the more expensive carrier.
But your damages don’t go down. What happened?
You didn’t have all the data points for an informed decision. After looking deeper into the situation, you find that the damaged shipments started to increase when the shipping department switched to a different type of package that was supposed to be better. The new packing materials did not provide the same protection as what you were using. So, you ended up paying more by changing carriers, which wasn’t the cause of the issue at all.
That’s the type of mistake that gathering more data points can help you avoid making. And using a powerful analytics tool like Microsoft Power BI gives you the ability to do that and understand what all your data means in comprehensive terms.
Microsoft Power BI Business Benefits
Here are some of the key advantages of using Microsoft’s business intelligence dashboard to gain more insights into your daily operations.
#1 Connect Data from Multiple Sources
If you’re trying to read your data from manual spreadsheets or individual application reports, it’s going to be difficult to see how data connects and tells a story. For example, you may have one email campaign that has a lot of clicks through to your website, but are those people actually purchasing? For that knowledge, you need to see analytics for both your email program and accounting program together.
Microsoft Power BI allows you to connect all your data, no matter where it’s coming from. You can connect Excel spreadsheets, on-premise SQL databases, streaming data, and hundreds of cloud services (like Dynamics365, Salesforce, MailChimp, QuickBooks and Xero).
#2 Real-Time Reporting
If there’s an immediate drop in website leads, you’ll know about it in real-time and can address the problem then, rather than after two more days of slower than usual sales. You’re able to visualize your data as it’s coming in, so you’re always alerted of anything that needs your attention right away.
#3 Ask Questions in Natural Language
Data analytics aren’t very helpful if the reporting interface is cumbersome and difficult to navigate. Microsoft Power BI makes it easy to get the information you want, by simply asking a question, such as “What was last year’s sales by product, compared to this year’s sales by product?”
The program then serves up the appropriate graphs and charts to give you the answer.
#4 Grow Your Sales
Insights into how people interact with your website and marketing campaigns can give you invaluable information into the things you’re doing to encourage customer acquisition and retention, so you can do more of it.
Data insights can significantly impact your sales. According to MicroStrategy:
- Companies that are data-driven are 23x more likely to acquire customers
- Companies that are data-driven are 6x more likely to retain their customers
#5 Easily Share Data to Empower Your Team
Microsoft Power BI allows you to easily share and access reports across multiple devices and collaborate in real-time, so your team is empowered to make smart, data-driven decisions with confidence. You can create personalized dashboards so each user can view the data reporting most pertinent to their position.
Get a Demonstration of Microsoft Power BI
Would you like to see how Microsoft Power BI could visualize your business data and help you make better decisions? Here's great short video from Microsoft titled What is Power BI?
NetCare can show you what this business intelligence dashboard looks like in action and help you set it up to collect all your data points.
Contact our Professional Services team today to get started at (02) 9114 9920 or