At Main Street Apps, we appreciate a No code/Low code approach to reporting and that’s what humbly aligns us with the Power BI solution. It is the future and the future is now! Already this year, Power BI has, once again, landed Microsoft in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms. Why? It empowers your users to get the data that they need and, scaling to your users’ skill levels, can be as swift as typing a question into your dashboard, “How many leads are active this month?” for instance.
Whether you are a number cruncher and report creator using Power BI Desktop, or simply require access to dashboards and alerts using Power BI Services or the phone application to monitor statistics: check on inventory, leads, new hires, financials, and any of innumerable KPIs/KRs and other business operations in order to monitor your business’ success: In order to reap the benefits of your Business Intelligence strategy, it should include real-time organizational insight that can be used for decision making.
“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” – John Tukey, recipient American Statistical Association, and US National Medal of Science
How is your month-end close coming along? Maybe taking many days longer than intended? The question that comes up, when your data is not all stored in one central repository is, how do you determine your single source of truth in order to ensure that the everyone is seeing the same data? If you are the rare bird, only reporting over one ERP system, or you are prepared to agree on single version of truth, perhaps a data warehouse isn’t for you. For many of us, however, the process of gathering data from several sources, databases and SaaS applications, and then manually combining into Excel, and agreeing on this version of truth, has become the tedious norm. This, followed closely by ensuring that user’s only see the data for which they should have access. This is where the power of the data warehouse comes in and is arguably one of the most important subsets of business intelligence.
With a data warehouse, real-time data from multiple sources are integrated so that users can seamlessly and simultaneously access it from their mobile devices or any computer, via the Power BI platform. Dashboards are updated automatically. In addition to accessing live/real-time data, since the data is secure, users only see data for their business roles. For example, if Human Resources builds an Employee Benefits Report, users will only see data that is associated with business units for which their access is defined. Efficiency, flexibility and one source of truth.
Is a Power BI and a data warehouse integration right for you? We can help! -Joe Wolf is an ERP Functional Analyst and Business Intelligence Solution Consultant with Main Street Apps.