Everyone is looking for answers to similar questions: what should we do to maximize profits or conversely minimize losses? Which branch of business is the most profitable? Why do we have such high costs? Maybe it's time to re-brand or restructure?
Business analytics tries to answer these and other questions, but in order to do so, real data (business information) is necessary. Many times they are scattered across multiple FK systems, ERP, databases, or text files, and are ultimately subject to painstaking analysis in Excel once a month, quarter, or year.
A lot of time is wasted copying formulas, building worksheets from scratch. As the worksheets are getting larger it is difficult to share them via e-mail. There is also the issue of security and protection of often critical data.
Time to prepare statements and charts each time can be labor-intensive, and the result obtained is not always clear to the recipient (tabular statements, static reports).
In my series of articles I want to show how, without having to create complex formulas and code, you can quickly prepare interesting and dynamic reports.
In my work, I use various sets of business analysis tools. The current one is Microsoft's Power BI tool. In addition to Tableu or Qlick, Power BI according to Forbes rankings is becoming one of the most interesting solutions of this class. What convinces at the beginning, especially those who are new to data mining and analysis, is first of all:
- An intuitive environment where anyone without a specialist with IT knowledge is able to quickly crank out a simple report, e.g., copy data sets from spreadsheet files, can connect to a database and eliminate copying data manually.
- The system has many built-in connectors by default, e.g., built-in google analytics
- the possibility of detailed analysis of data on the enterprise, a particular branch of business, a process in the organization. A well-prepared report will make it possible to detect the areas from which the organization derives the greatest profits or generates losses, and to locate anomalies that are easy to overlook with classical methods of analysis),
- The ability to visualize forecasts and advanced data mining methods (R language), as well as custom visualizations (e.g., using a map of the building with the number of occupants plotted on it as a base).
- Ability to work on real-time or time-synchronized data,
- sharing reports on various devices, including mobile devices with people inside and outside the organization.
- price (you don't have to invest a lot of money from the beginning to have interesting reports for medium-sized organizations),
- a model for implementing changes (new features are introduced month by month based on suggestions from the community).
Depending on: the volume of data to be analyzed, the size of the organization and security policies, each organization can choose its deployment option, i.e. decide where the reports will be placed:-cloud service,
-local environment behind the FireWall gateway,
- Or the middle-class environment.
For the cloud variant, there is a choice of the type of subscription the organization will use. Currently, there are two types of licenses, PRO and Premium, and the choice of type should be based on the scale of use of the service and the amount of data to be analyzed/visualized.
If, for security reasons, an organization's data cannot be pushed to the cloud and analyzed there, a Power BI Report Server deployment, which comes with a Power BI Premium subscription or a SQL Server 2016 license with a purchased SA package, is required for Power BI reports to work properly in a local environment.
For more information on the tool and how to license it, visit the following pages:
https://powerbi.microsoft.comhttps://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
Finally ...
Another article in the BI series is coming soon. In it, I will demonstrate how to cleverly present the occupancy of units in a building using custom floor map primers.
Have more questions about the tool, or BI solutions, contact us.
