Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the technology that enables businesses to organize, analyse and contextualize business data from around the company. BI includes multiple tools and techniques to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable information.
Real World Use for Business Intelligence
Microsoft Business Intelligence is an incredibly powerful tool. Part of the Power Platform environment Business Intelligence in its Pro form costs £90 plus VAT a year (at the point of publishing) and opens a whole new world on how to use the data from your central system to create meaningful reports and visuals based on what you need to know.
Power Business Intelligence is sometimes referred to as a Decision Support System because it helps analyse and present data in the most relevant way to you and your business which assists you to make the best decisions.
Power Business Intelligence is sometimes referred to as a Decision Support System because it helps analyse and present data in the most relevant way to you and your business which assists you to make the best decisions.
Example
With a tool that has multiple uses we felt providing a tangible real-world example will help you, the reader understand how practical Power BI Pro can be.
Business Intelligence Scenario
A business wishes to get their sales team out ‘on the road’. This activity is not only to visit regular customers but whilst in the area, get in to visit historic customers who haven’t done business with you recently. Putting together this information traditionally has taken many hours of checking who has been invoiced, who has not, where customers are located and what is a feasible and executable call plan.
This customer has deployed Business Central as its central system. Each licensed user has a basic Power BI licence included in their subscription, thus can run a report for themselves using the parameters built out by the Power BI PRO licence holder.
This video gives an overview how a potential call plan can be put together, by postcode, providing customer and historic customer names, locations, distances, and a real-world driving radius ensuring that time and fuel for customer and potential customer visits is used to best advantage.
The report can be built out to include contacts in the CRM area of Business Central who are not and never have been customers i.e.: prospects. (This will depend on the use of the ‘Contacts’ area and what information has been recorded during telephone calls, enquiries, historic quotations and previous visits.)
Depending on the data you record in Business Central the report can be built out to include only customers who have a service contract, or indeed, who do NOT have a service contract!
The permutations and possibilities are wide and vast but will always depend on the central system you are pulling your information from. The better the data, the better Business Intelligence can provide what data you need to see in the format you need to see it in.
An ERP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for example, holds all financials, operational and CRM data in a single SQL database hence data can be pulled from all areas of the business for analysis and reporting from a single source. That gives you a central point of truth for your business-critical data.
Next Steps for your Business Intelligence use
If the mapping report is something you want to explore further – then please get in touch. We have provided this as an example as we were asked by several customers in different industries for a very similar BI report which led us to believe it would be useful for many of you.
We charge a nominal fee to set it up for and make minor report build out changes. We show you around this BI report and make sure you are confident navigating it.
Thought for the Day
Have a Business Intelligence Request?
We are keen to hear your feedback and ideas about other ways you feel Business Intelligence could support your decision making. As with this mapping report – if there is sufficient demand, we can create a report like this one, so customers have the foundation to build out over time.
Contact Qi to discuss how using Power BI in your business will provide you the information you need to see, in the format you need to see it in and save you hours of time, manually putting information together.