Business Intelligence is not just a buzz word (or two). It’s where the rubber meets the road when it comes to reporting and analysis.
BI helps you make sense of your data with actionable data points.
There are many BI tools and applications on the market today. Many of them are quite good and will provide the reports and analytics you’re looking to glean from your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. Our goal here is not to compare and contrast them, but rather to expound upon the virtues of Business Intelligence.
Since many of us here at Strategic Systems Group (SSG) use Microsoft Power BI, for purposes of this article, we’re going to use Power BI as our example.
Simply stated, Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that can be leveraged to analyze data and share insights.
What does that mean? Power BI has dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of your business, with the most important metrics all in one place, updated in real time, and available on all of your devices. With one click, users can explore the data behind the dashboard using intuitive tools that make finding the answers easy.
Creating dashboards is easy, too, thanks to hundreds of connections to popular business applications. Plus, Power BI comes with a number of prebuilt dashboards to you get started on your BI journey immediately. You can access your dashboards and reports from anywhere with the Power BI Mobile apps, which update with any changes to your data automatically.
The Power BI tools facilitate the ability to build creative and actionable reports and dashboards. It’s all about data mashup. In other words, combining data from disparate sources, databases, files and Web services with visual tools that help you understand the data, make adjustments, and ultimately create stunning reports that communicate your message effectively.
With the Power BI service, you can publish reports securely within your organization and set up automatic data refresh so that everyone has the latest and greatest information.
A Power BI dashboard is a single page, often called a canvas, that uses visualizations to tell a story. Because it is limited to one page, a well-designed dashboard contains only the most important elements of that story. Here’s an example:
The visualizations you see on the dashboard are called tiles and the tiles are pinned to the dashboard from reports. The difference between a report and a dashboard is that a report may be more than one page in length but a dashboard can be built from more than one report and can display multiple datasets.
BI engenders greater productivity and informed decision making. No matter what ERP system you’re running, there’s a BI application that will bring your reporting and analytics to new heights. Let’s chat about the power of BI for your ERP solution. We’re at www.ssgnet.com, 310-539-4645, and info@ssgnet.com.
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