Now, imagine a scenario where you come to work on a Monday morning and, with just a few clicks, you can find out how your team performed in the past week, how performance differed from the previous week, whether any employees are lagging and need motivation, or if someone consistently outperforms others and deserves a reward.
Or maybe you want to know how your stores are performing in different regions, which target audience to focus on, in which cities people return products the most, where promotional discounts are most effective, or what impact public holidays and weekends have on your business.
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then your company needs to work on its reporting.
Reporting Tools
This is where reporting tools come into play. The most popular reporting tools currently include Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, Cognos, and Google Data Studio. However, Power BI is undoubtedly the dominant reporting tool. Below, I will attempt to summarize why Power BI leads among BI applications and how we provided insight into the KYC process for one of our clients using Power BI, allowing them to track the customer lifecycle, manage risk, and allocate their employees more effectively.
Power BI is a powerful and user-friendly platform that enables companies and individuals to visualize data, perform analyses, and share insights through interactive reports and dashboards. The advantage for users is that its basic desktop version is free and compatible with all Microsoft products.
Benefits of Power BI
We have access to a variety of data sources, including relational databases, cloud services, Excel files, CSV files, websites, and many others, which can be connected to. Once these data sources are loaded into Power BI, we can model, clean, merge them, and create new metrics and columns using the DAX language. This allows us to create quality reports even with data that may not have an optimal structure.
In the case of our client mentioned above we used import of data from the database with automated refresh. We chose this option mainly because the underlying data from the database was updated only once a day, so Direct Query did not make sense. The report also has a faster response time. We modeled the individual input tables and created metrics, such as the number of clients whose cases are already delayed or the percentage of each nationality, among others.
Features and Visualizations
Thanks to the diverse range of visualizations offered by Power BI, we can display data in a way that provides a comprehensive view. There are various types of line charts, bar charts, pie charts, bubble charts, network graphs, matrices, maps, histograms, indicators, and treemaps. The possibilities are nearly limitless, with new ones constantly being added. We are capable of choosing any design, customizing almost every part of the report, using a company color palette, or selecting one of the modern designs offered by Power BI. All visuals are interactive with each other, which is useful when analyzing trends and patterns in the data and can help you make informed decisions. Conditional formatting can be used to highlight potential issues, whether slicers and filters allow for isolated analysis of data from different categories. Various types of buttons and bookmarks also can be used to turn a report into an interactive application.
Specifically, in the aforementioned case of our client, we primarily used visualizations in the form of matrix and various types of graphs and slicers. In addition, we also used the function to drill through to the detailed information in a non-aggregated form. The customer can monitor the development of trends and drill through into the details if he intends to.
Sharing and Working with Reports and Dashboards
Finished reports and dashboards can be easily shared with other users inside or outside the company according to individual license terms and data access permissions. Integration into MS Teams and a mobile phone version are also advantages. For example, as a manager, you can monitor your custom-designed dashboard without access to a computer. Additionally, the tool allows you to send an alert if a monitored metric exceeds a defined threshold. In the context of the aforementioned case of our client, sharing is mainly used for department managers who further manage their team with the help of reports.
Conclusion
It’s no wonder that Power BI has become an indispensable partner for companies and individuals seeking a way to gain deeper insights into their data and gain a competitive advantage in the market. With its continuously evolving features, we can expect Power BI to play a key role in future data analysis trends. The fact that Power BI developers are keeping pace with the times is demonstrated by the use of artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. As a report user, you can now ask a question or assign a task in natural language, resulting in a specific visualization or an answer to your question.
There is no further need to wait for complex manual reports delivered once a month. Thanks to reporting automation, you can focus on solving real problems. Implementing good reporting isn’t easy; it requires a solid understanding of the business agenda, metric identification, preparation of a suitable domain model, data preparation (including data quality resolution), implementation of necessary transformations, and choosing an appropriate form of visualization.
We will be pleased to guide you through the implementation of reporting so that the real benefits for your business come in a short time.