The Effectiveness of Real-Time Planning with Power BI
Integrating new strategies and the right technologies is imperative in ensuring a smooth-running operation. Implementation of software that not only ensures data accuracy but also creates a collaborative environment can remediate issues of faulty communication amongst staffers around the world.
This is why businesses and Fortune 500 companies are turning to new ways to leverage their business intelligence software. According to Forbes, leveraging business intelligence software beyond traditional analysis can help businesses boost productivity, monitor important trends in data, and increase profit margins.
Real-Time Planning in Power BI with Power ON
Statistics changing at the drop of a dime, an inability to interpret visual data, and a lack of collaboration across dispersed employees are all issues plaguing businesses today. As many companies continue to use Microsoft Excel, whose efficacy cannot be understated, the modern spreadsheet is evolving.
Through Microsoft Power BI, the true potentials of integrated data from Excel, Azure, and other data sources are harnessed. The ability to craft stories through visually appealing graphs and digestible charts allows businesses to clean data, understand key metrics, and craft narratives based on the provided information. Power ON offers the next step — allowing users to offer on-the-spot edits, in-depth analysis, and partake in real-time planning.
With Power ON’s edit, write-back, planning, and forecasting features, many issues surrounding company planning and decision making workflow can be remediated — from data accessibility to data quality management. Your teamwork and collaborative efforts will exponentially increase, too.
CHALLENGE #1: Insufficient Teamwork and Collaboration
A massive area of vulnerability for organizations is the lack of teamwork, collaboration, and real-time planning. A byproduct of poorly-run management systems and outmoded software, companies can fall behind the curve without a streamlined platform of communication. And with employees working in different time zones and hybrid work-from-home environments, having team members on the same page is integral to a smooth-running operation.
It’s a pitfall that many fall victim to due to siloed data sources, spreadsheets, and disparate systems and processes. With unintegrated, inaccessible data floating across locations, many organizations will see employees work independently via spreadsheets and reports that never reach their intended target. Power ON, however, integrates the systems of Excel and Azure (along with Power BI) to pool crucial information together — allowing for robust data collection and input across the board.
Power ON remediates the lack of teamwork and collaboration by affording full accessibility to crucial information from front-line to leadership. With the ability to edit, comment, and write-back, teammates can easily collaborate and make key decisions — no matter the place, no matter the time zone.
CHALLENGE #2: Circumventing Issues Around Data Accessibility
Excel revolutionized data analysis. However, as years pass, companies can be left with an overwhelming amount of spreadsheets, complicated formulas, and hard-to-disseminate data — on top of a slow interface. Condensing valuable spreadsheets into understandable information on a streamlined software for users of all skill sets allows for greater transparency and is conducive to real-time planning.
With Power ON, data from Excel and Azure can now be supercharged by Power BI. Now, key decision-makers now have ease of access to critical, automated information that’s updated in real-time — a feature crucial in a dynamic, hyper-fast work environment. With easy-to-read charts, graphs, and updated real-time statistics, the processes of sales, capacity, and financial planning become more accessible and accommodating to all employees across the board. No high-tech literacy needed.
With features like editing and write-back across your organization, Power ON makes collaboration a two-way street. So whether you’re in marketing, finance, or IT, processes such as budgeting and forecasting, sales planning, and master data management can all be boiled down to their simplest form — reaching users and stakeholders all across your organization.
CHALLENGE #3: Increasing Accuracy and Expediting Timeliness of Data
When having disorganized spreadsheets across Excel and unharvested data from across multiple data sources, it can be quite difficult to pool all of those valuable resources together. Power ON, however, gives users one platform to agglomerate all of this information. You can make a spreadsheet in Excel, import it into Power BI, and make it write-back-enabled with Power ON. And not only can you funnel data from Excel, but you can also integrate data from across data sources into Power ON — a level of data lake synthesis no other platform offers.
Offering detailed granularity and forecasting functionality, Power ON’s combination of spreadsheet-like interface and Azure data can be automated to your liking. With month-to-date, multi-year, year-to-year forecasting (and more), organizations can visualize and interact with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) well into the future. An organization that wants to forecast future financials and said KPIs can enter data directly into grids or sheets in Power BI (much like in Excel), and the related graphs and charts will update in real-time. This allows users from the front-line to leadership a free-flowing and communicative platform that ensures aligned decisions based on real-time and accurate data.
In the case of Stewart Title, a leading US-based Title Insurance company, their quarterly forecast speed averaged around five-plus weeks with their former process of Oracle Hyperion + spreadsheets. With Power ON, which allowed for data entry, commentary, forecasting, workflows and approvals, and real-time planning, they cut forecasts to just two weeks. Another organization, this time in the healthcare industry, was able to streamline data validation, leveraging data entry via Power BI, from 40 hours a month per user to just one hour a week!
One Fortune 500 business in the pharmaceutical industry was able to save hundreds of hours a month in data prep and was able to have information expedited from front-line to leadership in no time. And the economic impact? Over $100 million gross margins for said company.
How You Can Supercharge Your Real-Time Planning in Power BI
As data continues to grow, data sources continue to multiply, and organizations continue employing decision makers across hybrid environments, the need for real-time and collaborative planning and decision support around a consistent environment is imperative. Leveraging existing investments in Business Intelligence, in new ways can catapult you out of manual, disconnected, delayed plans and forecasts. With the ability to edit, write-back, plan, and forecast, in Power BI, Power ON affords users greater command over their organization and its key decisions.
No longer will siloed spreadsheets and reports go unnoticed, as Power ON brings the ability to analyze, plan, and forecast where users — from front-line to leadership, are choosing to work and make decisions in the modern world; in their BI tool of choice, Power BI . So whether it is a need to observe data trends, boost productivity, or increase profit margins, adding Power ON to your Power BI investment will further supercharge your company’s ability to thrive, in today’s turbulent, hyper changing world.
For more information on how Power ON can help your business, contact us today to schedule a consultation.
