Using Power BI for Data Unification
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How Power BI Enables Data Unification & Drives Business Growth

28 Feb 2022

More enterprises are embracing a data-centric culture that integrates information from disparate sources for fast & informed decision making. To stay competitive in a digital-first world, millions of data pointers are being collected on consumer demographics, marketing campaigns, purchase preferences, sales & other crucial KPIs. But, the bigger challenge here is to unify all the structured/unstructured data that’s being captured & stored in silos. And this is keeping businesses from extracting the right insights & taking decisions that drive business growth.

So, is there a tool or technology that can integrate different data sources into a logical whole?

Can it collate all the information to present a complete & accurate picture of what’s happening in real-time?

Can it provide actionable analytics & rich visualizations?

The answer is Yes!

With BI & Analytics tools, you can not only unify your data but also visualize & analyze it with greater accuracy, speed and efficiency! So, if you’re looking to leverage this power-packed tool to make smart decisions faster, then dive right in!

Here’s What We’ll Cover:      

Data Unification Challenges Faced By Organizations

Efficient management of corporate data requires numerous software tools such as CRM, ERP, email marketing tools and more. These systems collect data in silos with different authentication & permission levels. With the volume & variety of business data doubling down every year, data management issues are growing at a compounding rate globally!  As businesses of every size & scope rush to make sense of these ever-expanding data sources, they’re faced with a variety of challenges.

In many cases, the challenges start with inadequate knowledge, the absence of the right tech stack, lack of skilled resources and limited funds. Consolidating information into a centralized repository and ensuring that it is accurate and consistent across systems, further complicates unification efforts.

So, while data unification is highly beneficial across industries, it comes with some key challenges such as:

  • Importing, cleaning & compiling raw data
  • Data mining & processing
  • Ensuring universal usability
  • Disseminating information & storytelling
  • Viewing and evaluating data
  • Finding the right algorithms & data inputs for predictive analysis
  • Evaluating the predictions
  • Ensuring that visual forecasting models are not misleading audiences

So, how do you bring people & processes together and give them the right information in real-time to make the best decisions?

The answer is Business Intelligence!  

BI is a set of technologies & capabilities that can transform data into valuable insights that drive smarter business decisions. Let’s see how.

How BI Tools Help Solve Data Unification Challenges

With BI tools you can perform tasks such as:

  • Data preparation: Compiling data from different sources & formatting them into a uniform state for further exploration
  • Data querying: Extracting answers from siloed datasets for data-specific questions
  • Data visualization: Creating graphical representations of analysis for easy understanding
  • KPI reports: Comparing current metrics against historical data and sharing the results with key decision-makers.
  • Data mining: Using ML & statistical models to discover trends in big datasets

These tools have become the backbone of modern businesses; enabling them to project, achieve & measure goals.

  • They make data analysis as swift, seamless and streamlined as possible.
  • They’re highly efficient for tracking goals with digestible charts.
  • And finally, if your enterprise is not meeting a specific metric, BI tools can help target problem areas early on and find solutions faster.

From online retailers and law enforcement agencies to the government and tech giants, every sector is spending millions of dollars to ramp up their ability to compile, clean and analyze data using BI tools. When used efficiently they enable you to seize opportunities, avert risks and streamline fulfillment processes on a global scale.

But only the right analytics tool can provide a clearer & bigger picture of what has been achieved so far and where it should be heading.

So what are your options?

Popular BI tools include Tableau, Qlik, Sisense and Google Data Studio but most businesses are gravitating toward Microsoft Power BI. No wonder, it lead the way in analytics and cloud business intelligence in 2021 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. It just keeps getting better by the day and Microsoft is consistently updating it to meet the data needs of the future.

What Makes Power BI the Top Choice of Global Businesses

With the value of real-time analytics rising to the front line, organizations choose & prefer it because it offers:

  • Complete control over disparate data and real-time insights
  • Flexibility to customize Power BI app navigation
  • Data processing is performant and powerful
  • Seamless integration with Azure
  • Advanced analytics with excel features & assured performance
  • In-built custom, open-source visuals
  • Native R integration for data mining & statistical modeling
  • A perfect combination of security and data governance
  • Ability to embed Power BI tiles into custom apps

While some are using it to integrate different data sets others are leveraging it to streamline their reports. But most importantly, they all want to harness the potential of analytics so they can extract valuable business intelligence to stay competitive, be more responsive & maximize revenue streams.

Break Down Barriers to Profitable Insights with Power BI

Leverage our experience in analytics to minimize the time spent on data & maximize BI value

Take A Look at Some of the Transformational Stories

At Rishabh, we’ve has assisted several global clients with Power BI implementations across industries.

eCommerce Dashboard Solution

An eCommerce startup generating revenue from different sales channels was seeking a custom dashboard for deeper insights into their business performance.
Challenges

  • It was very tedious to consolidate data from multiple sales channels for comparison of revenue generation
  • There was no system in place for revenue analysis

Solution

  • Fetched the data from multiple eCommerce websites through APIs & extracted insights to compare revenue growth
  • Created eCommerce dashboards that reflect sales & revenue data from different integrated platforms such as Shopify & Amazon

Benefits

  • Centralized dashboards that offer real-time insights from different websites to track the overall product performance
  • Accurate analysis of revenue generated from different sources for making profitable decisions in the future

Accounting Solution

A leading accounting solution provider wanted to develop custom dashboards for revenue and cash flow analysis.

Challenges

  • Multiple KPIs to be incorporated into one visualization for better analysis and dynamic calculation of high-paying customers
  • Complex calculations for accounting profit & loss statement with previous year’s comparison

Solution

  • Created standard templates & dashboards for Revenue and Cash flow analysis & comparison with cumulative analysis
  • Dynamically calculated analysis based on the last 12 months’ data & top 9 customers for revenue generation for each month

Benefits

  • Increased customer product visibility based on competition analysis and dynamic pricing strategies
  • Identification of businesses opportunities & areas of improvement

Such data-driven initiatives have enabled our clients to boost their efficiency levels, track revenue, keep customers satisfied and quickly respond to emerging market trends – all with an end goal of improving business performance! Learn more about how can you leverage our strength as a Power BI development company to transform the way you analyze & act on your business data.

How Power BI Enables Businesses to Overcome Challenges & Drive Better Decisions

With Power BI, it’s easier to keep all the decision-makers on the same page, collaborate in a centralized, easy-to-use platform and exploit data with absolute ease. It empowers you to pull insights, compare historic data with real-time reports, and make accurate predictions based on past trends. From there, you can drive decisions that bring profits, from routine operations to far-reaching process improvements.

It’s a one-stop solution for every business that is dealing with huge, complex & challenging data-based processes. Let’s take a look at how it helps address all your pain points and churn more profits!

Extract Practical Insights with Zero Coding Skills

Using Power BI to prepare statistical summaries

Power BI’s drag-and-drop interface enables both tech-savvy and non-technical analysts to efficiently build rich visualizations and analyses. No programming skills are needed for preparing statistical summaries, performing trend analysis, or generating regressions. It can also be integrated with all Microsoft applications & third-party apps to generate actionable data from existing workflows.

The challenge it solves: Seamlessly connects your siloed data to deliver deeper & more useful insights

The impact it creates: Eliminates the need for hyper-complex operations and data engineers to simplify data acquisition, processing & structuring.

Merge Different Datasets Into A Centralized Dashboard

Easy access to a centralized dashboard using Power BI

All the visualizations from different sources can be combined into one easy-to-access dashboard for effortless understanding using free add-ons. Power KPI gives metrics and supporting data in charts and simplified graphs that are highly customizable. Users can also create powerful data models and have a high level of control over the business logic even when working remotely using different devices.

The challenge it solves: Eliminates data silos and creates a single source of data with a cohesive bigger picture that spans across the board.

The impact it creates: The accuracy & fluidity of data and easy access to a centralized dashboard can be a game-changer for your company’s efficiency, profitability, and competitiveness.

Gain Accuracy in Data with Unified Reporting

Data unification to gain accurate data

Companies worldwide are using Power BI to move away from manual, inefficient & error-prone reporting processes and tedious data entry tasks. If you want to go from static excels and PDFs to uniform data visualizations for 1000+ locations. These reports go a long way in aligning an organization’s strategic efforts, uncovering critical insights & accelerating enterprise-wide decision-making.

The challenge it solves: Brings all your mission-critical data together and to the surface for enhanced visibility while shaping it comprehensively to analyze information more accurately and make the best decisions faster.

The impact it creates: Saves hundreds of hours spent on heavy-duty data processing. Eliminates the need to wait for days and sometimes weeks for generating reports and deal with the risk of outdated data.

Overall, PowerBI accelerates enterprise-wide decision-making. The possibilities with the tool are endless, and they are constantly evolving and expanding. Read this blog to learn more about its features, components & benefits.

Final Verdict

It’s not hard to understand why Power BI is so popular among businesses looking to drive digital transformation for optimal growth & profitability. There’s no reason for you to continue tackling the pitfalls of disorganized data when it enables self-service analytics for faster time to insight and accurate reporting. So, if you’re ready to leverage the many tools and services available in Power BI, we’re here to solve all your business problems!

Make Your Data Work for You with Power BI

Rishabh can enable you to shift your focus from looking for data to working on actionable insights in real-time