What to expect from Power BI

Power BI is a business analytics solution that delivers insights to enable fast, informed decisions — transforming data into stunning visuals, making it easy to share with colleagues on any device. Here are my thoughts, as a Business Intelligence consultant, about what you can expect from Power BI.

Custom visuals

Power BI is not limited to “what’s in the box”. With custom visuals, Power BI allows you to have any visualization you can imagine. And it is easy to use with other Microsoft products and services; it has been engineered so it can be easily used with Excel, Office 365, Azure, and SQL Server. Its improved forecast accuracy paired with Dysel’s software solution, customers will have the ability to predict company needs based on time series dataset. 

For the equipment management industry

Currently, at Dysel we are working hard to develop reports based on Equipment Objects, Work Orders, Sales Invoices, Items, Time Sheets, etc. Microsoft Power BI is the standard reporting tool for Dysel; it is one of the leading reporting tools out there, giving users numerous possibilities to present reports.

Three ways customers will view these reports through ELC

1. Standard reporting with visuals concerning the subjects mentioned before. In these standard reports, the user can use some necessary filtering to show the numbers by for example company, branch or posting status. The user will not have permission to change things in the report. This option is available for desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A light version of Power BI is available on desktop, but the reports built with this are also available on tablets and mobile phones (the user will need the Power BI app for mobile devices).

2. Personalized dashboards with the standard report as a base. Users can place some visuals from the standard reporting in a personalized dashboard with their filtering.

3. Datasets: users can create their reports using a light version of Power BI. In this way, they can access the data (cubes) as mentioned before and use the fields in tables, graphs, and scorecards. They can also make this available for their organization.

The great thing about Power BI is that is an excellent product for any type of user; from upper management only interested in KPI’s of standard reports to the BI specialists that want to know every single detail in their customized reports. It means that Power BI is an easy and intuitive solution to use yet still offering the comprehensive functionalities you are looking for to run your organization successfully.

Bjorn Schouten is Business Intelligence Consultant at Dysel and helps customers to turn data into valuable management information.