Before the evolution of business intelligence (BI) solutions, there was no substantial way to handle the huge volumes of data generated by businesses daily. BI solutions and analytics are particularly important for businesses to make data-driven decisions, allowing them to stay ahead of their competitors and enhancing their customers’ satisfaction. Power BI is an ever-growing technology that can have a huge impact on a company’s ability to make effective tactical and strategic decisions. It offers game-changing features. This blog will discuss a few challenges the business world faces and how Power BI played its role in overcoming them.
One-off Reporting is Time Consuming
Gathering a huge amount of data from different sources can be an uphill task. You must rely on different departments to get data, interpret it, and then produce actionable insights. These reports need to be replicated during set intervals. You have to manually regenerate the report from the beginning. This is a challenge faced by many corporations. But as the business grows, waiting for data and then reworking on the reports to get the updated data is not a good approach as it affects your timeline and your productivity.
Power BI helps you to access your data instantly with less manual work. It can handle a huge amount of data making it easy to decipher using advanced visualizations. It allows you to get data from different data sources by automatically connecting with them, saving you time and effort. Once a report is created, you only have to hit refresh or enable a schedule refresh to get real-time insights. This will prevent any human error and skewed results.
Finding Specific Data in Large Data Volumes with Power BI
Going through spreadsheets in search of specific datasets is cumbersome. Data is presented in a non-user-friendly way and finding specific data from a vast amount of data can be quite inefficient.
Here comes Power BI, providing the users with an easy search of datasets. Once you have imported a dataset in PBI Desktop, you can access that anytime, from anywhere, as many times as you want. For instance, in the Query Editor, you can go to “View” in the header and select the “Go to Column” to navigate to the column you want. And on the main report page and in the data section there is a search right at the top of Fields. With that, you can search and filter all your objects to only those that match. Data can also be shared and published for others to view, so they can also have access to it and take an equal part in the decision-making process.
Data Quality
Everyone wants to use high-quality data for their analysis. Data quality is one of the most important aspects of a data analysis and is often overlooked or treated as an afterthought. Poor quality data can lead to inaccurate analytics and ill-conceived business strategies. If data is not accurate, complete, and clean, companies can make costly mistakes.
Power BI helps you quickly identify data quality issues and provides numerous ways to address them. Power Query provides you with exciting features to clean and prepare data for analysis. The data profiling tools can help you remove all the inconsistencies, null values, and data quality problems.
Lack of Security
Data Security is an essential issue for the adoption of any technology. If data is not secured correctly, it can get lost due to system failure, corrupted by a computer virus, deleted or altered by a hacker. This can lead to consequences like financial loss, reputational damage and loss of your customers.
Power BI overcomes these issues by leveraging Azure Active Directory for authentication and Power BI login credentials to access the resources.
You can then grant access to your data only to the people of your choice. Row-Level Security (RLS) is also possible in Power BI, which helps secure data and streamline administration.
And, by using Microsoft Information Protection you can define sensitivity labels and enforces governance policies whenever data is accessed.
Unable to Foresee Future Trends
Business Trends keep on changing according to the needs, wants, and tastes of the consumer. Prediction of future trends and opportunities is an essential task in business development. It is challenging for businesses to exist and stay relevant if they are not good at identifying and adapting to current trends. That is why spotting trends and showing how they change over time is essential and can help companies make suitable decisions. This gives them an edge and helps them stay ahead of their competition.
Power BI helps in monitoring the processes of the company. It can easily spot trends with the help of the data gathered during monitoring. Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) provides a wide range of functionalities for trends analysis. The trending AI Capabilities of Power BI help you visualize the future using predictive analytics and other such big data tools. This can help businesses foresee any need to recruit more employees, change a specific requirement, or further invest in technology.
Only Tech Teams can create Business Reports
Companies use many reporting tools to build their reports, but they are complicated. This is the reason that only tech teams can use them. Every time you want to open the report or perform a minor change in it, you must wait for your tech team to accomplish it. So, this means yet another delay.
On the other hand, Microsoft Power BI is a user-friendly and simple tool and can be used by anyone, even by non-experienced BI people. Usually, a skilled person is required to model the data, but no special skills are required in Power BI. So, it is quite easy to create and understand data through visualizations in Power BI.
Conclusion
Power BI is a tool with impressive analytical capabilities and immersive visual dashboards. It helps companies make data-driven decisions and facilitate easy implementation without requiring significant upfront expenses. The benefits of Power BI discussed above are good reasons for companies to consider investing in it and to improve their tactical strategic management processes.
I hope this blog has helped you understand how PowerBI can help solve some challenges with data faced in the business world. If you have any questions or insights, please leave a comment below.