How to Utilize Power BI for Comprehensive Business Analytics

by Tech Addict Writer, Blogger

With increasing digitization, there is a massive inflow of data from various sources like ERP, e-commerce platforms, supply chains & more. Organizations use a Business Intelligence (BI) system to take advantage of this data inflow and use it to generate a comprehensive view of the business. BI helps drive change, eliminate inefficiencies & generally helps make informed decisions for business benefits. BI encompasses processes like data mining, performance benchmarking, descriptive analytics & process analysis to present reports, performance measures and trends that can lead to making informed, intelligent business decisions.

Power BI from Microsoft is a powerful business analytics tool that allows you to visualize and analyze your data more efficiently and effectively.

Why use Power BI for Business Analytics

Here are some of the main reasons why Power BI is a popular choice for business analytics:

Better connectivity with data - Power BI makes it easy to collate data, resulting in more accessible, visible & organized & improved data reporting. Power BI tools support over 70 out-of-the-box connectors enabling businesses to access and collect data from a wide range of data sources, including Dropbox, Azure, Google Analytics, CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, SQL Databases & more.

In-built connectors enable data analysis, while the interfaces can be customized as per need. Power BI also boasts a drag-and-drop feature that allows combining multiple files when merging data into a single report.

BI offers open-source custom visuals - Power BI offers pre-packed data visuals like columns, lines, bars, maps, and pie to leverage interactive data reports. It also provides various customization options that can enhance the functionality and presentation of these visuals.

The Power BI community, Microsoft Community and AppSource Marketplace offer a wide range of complex and rich visuals that can be used to include bullet graphs, decision trees, sparklines, correlation plots, heatmaps and more.

Ease of use: Power BI has a user-friendly interface that requires no coding skills, making it accessible to business users who may not have technical expertise.
Integration – Helps seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft products, such as Excel, SharePoint, and Teams, as well as third-party tools, allowing you to work with your data across multiple platforms. Power BI supports R-integration, an open-source programming language with more than 7000 packages & which is primarily designed for data statisticians and miners. Power BI is beneficial for data slicing and drilling, which helps represent better relationships among variables, hierarchies and critical metrics.
Enhanced data governance and security - User access and security can be managed within the same interface of Power BI, ensuring that regulatory and compliance standards are met. Power BI offers an inbuilt Azure Active Directory (AAD) for user authentication, allowing for leveraging Single Sign-On (SSO) and regular Power BI login credentials for data access.
Customization: Power BI allows you to customize your reports and dashboards to meet the specific needs of your business. You can create custom visuals, add branding, and customize the layout to suit your preferences.
Embed Power BI tiles into custom PowerApps - PowerApps is a powerful enterprise-level tool that can be used to create functional business applications on all platforms, such as Android, iOS, Windows, and web browsers, with a simple interface. For PowerApps users, Power BI custom visuals can be used to embed personalized Power BI tiles within the app.

Power BI’s native integration with PowerApps allows users to send and receive data using the in-built custom application within a similar interface.

Advanced analytics - The embedded Power BI Service makes it easier to transform, enrich and integrate the business data into Power BI dashboards and reports. The Power BI tool is a potent tool that is easy to learn and allows users to leverage the data easily.
Power BI is powerful and efficient - Power BI’s Power Pivot database modeling engine, shared with Excel, is a high-performing columnar database. It uses modern tabular databases to compress tables and ensures full memory access for maximum performance. Power BI can also automate incremental updates, ensuring that the data stays current and simplifying visual reporting for users. Power BI can compress and load massive records to memory, allowing faster data analysis and efficient user experience.
Natural language query engine - Power BI users can use its natural language query engine to gain insights into data. Natural language queries can give results in charts or table visualizations that can represent the data accurately. Power BI’s intuitive query engine works without code or syntax. Mobile Power BI now also supports voice recognition Q&A.

Use cases for Power BI

Amazon

Amazon uses Power BI to offer personalized product recommendations and make informed logistical decisions. Its logistics and supply chain uses predictive and in-depth data analysis, while data analytics helps it to optimize its inventory allocation, shipping routes etc.

Coca-Cola

Coke uses AI-powered image recognition technology to identify when images of its drinks are posted online. Power BI assists it in knowing and identifying its customer segment, like age, sex, location, etc.

In conclusion, Power BI can have a vast and identifiable impact on business analytics. A Power BI consulting services company can take this big data and provide real-time dashboards with intelligent and robust reports and analysis. Such services can help businesses identify issues, trends & opportunities and organize and structure data to create concise and actionable information that all the stakeholders can use within the organization.