Over the last six years, Microsoft Power BI has evolved, matured, has brought in a lot of new features. Six years back, when I first started using Microsoft Power BI, it was just one of the tools among the crowd of tools that I had access to and may not have been that interesting, at that point in time. It was fairly rudimentary and fairly basic in terms of its feature capabilities. However, in the last six years, Microsoft has put a lot of focus and effort into developing it further, and has, on a regular incremental basis, started deploying and enabling capabilities and features, which now makes Microsoft Power BI one of the leading BI tools in the industry.

We realized the benefits very quickly. In 30 minutes, a company can begin to realize the benefits.

In the most basic use case, which is for a user to be able to just access a data which he or she normally would not have been able to himself or herself, since they don't have SQL query knowledge, or they don't know how to access, log into a SQL Server or a database. They can do that using Power BI within half an hour or less.

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For our bank itself, there are various tools used by different business users. Some people use MicroStrategy; some use Cognos or its next product. We wanted to have one common tool that any business user can use for analytics. 

Power BI, once made available, can connect to various data sources, irrespective of the application, whether it be HR or business applications. The bank has many applications, but all eventually need to generate reports for tracking, distribution, or problem-finding based on analysis. Power BI was made available as part of the productivity suite to all businesses, which can connect to their applications and provide the reports and analysis they require. 

So, it's more of a strategic tool for the bank to consolidate different siloed business analytic tools with Power BI, serving everyone in the business regardless of what applications they use; they can use Power BI to generate reports.

Power BI also offers mobile app benefits for data access and analysis. The mobile app is available but only in read mode. We are a bank, so there are specific data protection capabilities required to make this available for use on mobile. However, it is already part of the BI suite, and it is easy for us to roll out using Intune. 

Intune is another product we use to manage applications on mobile devices. It can protect data in case someone tries to copy it out. While Power BI has a mobility function, the bank has to ensure that the right protection technology is available. Microsoft Intune integrates very well, allowing us to apply protection policies, but at this point in time, it has not been rolled out.

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We have a product called ED Tracker, and we allow clients to subscribe to this product, and they use it through Power BI. It enables us to offer new services to clients and basically allows them to work on the data or report themselves, rather than sending them data with PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, etc. So, we work with our clients through this platform. They need to have the license. If they want to access the system, we just tell them that they need to get a license. The license is very cheap. It is $10 a month per user. It is not very expensive, and once they have the license, they can access our cloud solution.

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Power BI has significantly enhanced our data analysis and visualization capabilities, showcasing its versatility. It seamlessly connects to a multitude of data sources, ranging from traditional databases to diverse formats such as flat files and specialized systems like ERP and SharePoint. Additionally, Power BI's transformation language, known as the M language, is remarkably flexible and user-friendly, empowering users to efficiently analyze and merge data sets.

The architecture of Power BI, including its dashboards and data refreshing capabilities, is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Particularly in the Azure environment, it offers enhanced power but also complexity. Managing this complexity can be challenging, requiring a skilled team to configure the tool and handle data transformations.

Integrating Power BI with other applications and services offers numerous benefits. It serves as a powerful tool for gathering analytics from diverse data sources or applications, providing quick access to analytical capabilities ranging from simple data slicing and dicing to advanced data science tasks. Power BI seamlessly integrates with data science tools like Python, enabling enhanced functionality. While its built-in charting capabilities may not be as extensive as some competitors, there's an ecosystem of add-ons and partner products available. Additionally, Power BI offers an open customization programming framework, allowing users to create custom features when needed.

The greatest value of Power BI lies in its ability to integrate data into a single platform, facilitating analysis with ease. This makes it ideal for proof of concept and launching initiatives, as tangible results can be achieved quickly. Power BI offers a straightforward path to generating multiple insights, providing a fast and efficient tool for obtaining actionable results.

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It has centralized our organization. It has democratized dashboard and report building and provides a centralized format. Without Microsoft BI, people would otherwise develop and manage their spreadsheets in Excel, which is just a lot harder than what Power BI enables us to do.

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It helps in automating the process of filling the data or refreshing the data to give you timely calculations for all the aspects of the dashboards that you have built. You can easily see all the real-time data with Power BI.

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Power BI works with both real-time and offline data. When interacting with real-time data across multiple systems, it offers a great advantage.

I've worked with real-time interactions and appreciate them, similar to how AI is increasingly being incorporated. It's fascinating to see the shift towards AI.

Using middleware technology, like web services, allows Power BI to interact with multiple systems efficiently. This request and response mechanism ensures data is transmitted from the source to the target system in real-time, which significantly benefits business operations by providing up-to-date information.

Moreover, integration capabilities were smooth. I worked on integrating Power BI with PeopleSoft, focusing on custom solutions rather than out-of-the-box features, tailoring the experience to specific needs.

Power BI is very user-friendly and easy to learn. I've even uploaded instructional videos on YouTube, which have helped many users, including some who have become long-term administrators of Power BI.

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I'm working with a law firm that has hundreds of professionals working across various areas for different clients. They struggle to accurately track hours worked per client and compare profitability. With Power BI, I can integrate data from their ERP systems and create insightful reports. These reports not only show the hours worked per client but also compare profitability between clients and highlight KPIs. By providing clear and actionable insights, Power BI helps the firm make informed decisions quickly, leading to improved profitability and efficiency.

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Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.

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While it hasn't significantly enhanced collaboration, it has greatly improved our reporting capabilities. It allows us to present visually appealing dashboards to management.

Our main focus with Power BI is dashboarding rather than collaboration.

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The usability of the tool is very simple. If you know the basics, it's fine. Even if you don't have the basics, there is a lot of self-service documentation available which helps to guide the user to start to use the tool, and how to navigate through it. 

There was also a new feature added last month to help new users practice using the system by providing an example data set to experiment with. Power BI server can be run on-premise so that your reports are available locally. Or you can have a premium version, including all your reports on the Cloud. It can be determined by the number of refreshes required from the reports or can depend on the volume of users that are consuming the reports.

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To gain insights into our sales and financial aspects, we use the Power BI solution, which provides us with valuable information and analytics.

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The company has been able to make better decisions, due to the fact that, when we prepare business intelligence or data analytics applications, they are used by very similar decision-makers, as well as middle-level management decision-makers. From the same infrastructure, the data is used by even the report consumers. You can consider three layers of users, report consumers, mid-level use, as in, those who do interactive analysis of data, and decision-makers. Right at the top, those who would like to see the key performance indicators and use them for deciding a course of action can do so. All of our applications have been providing functionality for all these types of needs, including risk and compliance.

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We can see things from a bird's eye view. We can do predictive analytics. I can tell who's capable, who's doing what, when and how much money they're spending, and how fast they're burning. So, it gives us a bird's eye view over the financials and the money. It basically gives us the ability to collaborate and keep track of everything that's going on in an organization. We were able to bring all the collaboration and tasks right into Power BI.

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Power BI helped me to improve the decision-making process. It was particularly useful when I had data in a table, and I was able to use it as a dashboard with filters for better insights.

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Microsoft provides internal training and they have open forums. Normally, if we have any query on any part of the product, they'll be very responsive to our needs. 

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Microsoft's CRM platform has very limited reporting capabilities. Power BI was able to meet the business requirements for reporting and more in-depth analytics. It is a part of the Microsoft Ecosystem, and there is a straightforward connection from Power BI to CRM. 

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The use case depends on the project. For example, in the logistics project, we need maybe four persons. For retail sales without stocks, it's a very easy project for us, but only for sales, and purchase orders, it's a standard part of the tool, to incorporate warehousing. Sometimes it's more difficult to clean the data if you have something like visualizations. It is often more difficult to understand what kind of data you need for the customer, or the strategy of the company who needs the information, to build a suitable solution. Customers often change their requirements. That's why Microsoft BI is more useful than traditional user tools, as it is flexible to changing requirements.

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Microsoft BI stack is very easy to use and most of the developer versions are free such as Power BI, DAX, SQL Server Development Edition. This helped us quick prototyping to generate value of data resting in silos. 

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For one client, it gives all sales reps across all geographic regions access to sales data, so they know who's purchasing what product in what part of the country, and that sort of thing. It shows them overtime when sales are high and low, as well as what types of customers are buying. We occasionally connect it to external data. We link it to some demographic data, such as population figures in different provinces in Canada, to see how sales are doing.

It is beneficial. It's one of the applications we use for a client's sales reps all over the country to get all kinds of sales data. It also benefits them. They can ask, "Why isn't this customer purchasing this specific product?" So they know which customers are genuine or who are purchasing and may try to push a different line with them. It provides a wealth of useful information to the salespeople.

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The functions from a standpoint of generating analytics have been really helpful overall. That aspect has helped improve our organization.

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Microsoft BI has proven beneficial for my organization as it simplifies the presentation of complex data that was previously challenging to comprehend through other means. Specifically, Power BI allows for graphical representation that significantly enhances data understanding compared to raw tables.

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The solution has improved a lot within the organization. We can view chunks of data and detailed data at various levels. 

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Microsoft BI has helped the creation of a powerful analytical tool able to detect inconsistencies in different customs and tax declarations/returns and thus allow the Tax Administration to have a full taxpayer view from the fiscal point of view. It finally leads to increasing the collected revenues by cross-checking data coming from different governmental sources. View full review »

It provides the common ground for data to be cleaned. We use this for everyone to work on cleaning up data in order to use it for visualizations, which has been helpful.

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The solution has helped increase the client's total sales revenue for their collection agent. It's basically MSBA, plus an AIML kind of solution and it helps the client to increase the overall efficiency of their collection agents, increasing total revenue for the company. 

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It has provided better and deeper analytics for our data. It has also been helpful for custom visualizations as per client requirements.

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This solution works very well for updating indicator boards, and for quick visualizations in demos. You can present results in many ways to improve the presentation.

I have used it on a variety of applications where it is important to show analysis and present information in a graphical perspective, and also to modify and present information to developers and executives.

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There have been occasions when a certain application would work very slowly on other DB platforms and once we migrated to SQL Server the response times improved dramatically. For example, I recently migrated an application from TeraData to SQL Server and the response times for some functions were cut down from 90 seconds to about less than 1 second! This obviously speeds up the work that gets done within a day.

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Power BI significantly organized our KPIs, making them accessible for immediate business decisions, like analyzing profits or losses. 

For example, in supply chain management, Power BI provides well-organized KPI data and calculated measures that aid decision-makers. Unlike before, they don't have to wait for detailed data; they get well-defined KPIs and calculated measures that offer insights into the business, allowing them to make informed decisions regarding future strategies and properties.

Power BI's collaboration functionality improves teamwork in our organization. We had a lot of entries and a lot of people who were working with Power BI. It's been four years, and some new members have less experience. We all collaborate to share information and experience, which improves collaboration.

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Microsoft BI, if used properly, can provide insights that will help management to take better decisions and can benefit from cost optimizations, reduce risks, etc.

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The business users have taken to Microsoft BI like a duck to water. It requires a low amount of training. Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes.

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Microsoft BI really entails a whole catalog of products. The relative ease with which these products work together is where the primary value comes into play. When you buy SQL Server Enterprise, you automatically have access to SSAS, which can handle Tabular or multidimensional cubes and data mining, SSIS offering a pretty comprehensive integration toolset, SSRS, covering just about any paginated and subscription-based reporting, and of course all of the in-built features of SQL Server, the individual useful features of which there are too many to spout out here. Each of these components work well enough in isolation, or as part of a larger ecosystem with other vendors, but together are a well-integrated machine that can handle end-to-end needs on the entire lifecycle of data. Being one of the more popular vendors, Microsoft products are also the first compatibility for other vendors' products. The breadth of products do a fine job at enabling the delivery of data and insights to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. Doing so efficiently/quickly is where a huge amount of value comes in. Many other enterprise vendors are capable, but are either slower to execute, more work to maintain, cost much more to find talent and skills for, or some combination of all of the above.

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BI provides us with strong computing power and calculations with quality visibility which helps with the whole pipeline.

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We were able to reduce costs by consolidating the 3 Crystal Report Servers down to just one server running SSRS (with one backup just in case). The time it took to run some reports in Crystal were exceeding 5 minutes. The same report in SSRS not only was significantly faster (down to 30 seconds) and the licensing cost savings allowed for a quicker return on investment (less than one year).

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It saved time.

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• An easy learning curve for analysts. If they know how to use Excel pivot tables, then they can self-serve building visitations on curated data. 
• Full stack end-to-end ETL and viz in one tool. 
• Power Query for ETL, and externally easy to use. Majority of activities are low or no code.
• Creating a model and augmenting with additional calculations and measures extremely easily. 
• Viz layer build is super fast. Very much like a PowerPoint experience. 
• All elements together allowed for the rapid deployment of PoC products that could be tested and validated by businesses before being deployed. 

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I was self-learning it, we don't use it in our organization. We are looking to use it though in the future. We use a different tool and want to see if we can get more questions answered with Power BI. It's linked to Office 365 and Azure, so it would help us to answer some difficult questions and help identify issues/problems so we can find solutions and adapt the model a lot quicker. Going through over 100,000 lines of data takes too long and we need to be able to group the data more to be able to identify what works better, so a pie chart or map will help to identify issues that are not working. 

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Prior to using the Microsoft BI stack the organization was using a lot of Access and Excel applications which became cumbersome as the organization grew. These tools helped us to streamline the reports and data integration.

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Primarily, it's all about visualization and dashboards. My organization is large, and I don't believe Power BI as a tool has changed or revamped the entire organization; rather, it assists us in creating dashboards. It made things easier. 

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The biggest improvement comes from a "do it once, refresh many" concept. The users used to perform a lot of massaging on the data itself prior to the analysis phase. Now, they build their reports and refresh the data, so they have a lot more time to perform analysis, which is the real added value to the business.

Unlike other tools (like Tableau), getting to this point took a lot of resources in training, but when the users got there, it is a real time saver for them, allowing them to focus more on analysis, not on data manipulation.

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This solution has provided an accurate analysis of our customers repurchasing the same plan for telecom Jio. It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization.

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I had a brilliant student in May last year, 2019, who did her graduate capstone project - where I was her advisor - using Power BI. And she has two times now responded to my invitation to be a guest speaker on that tool to classes such as the data analytics class that I've been teaching for about 20 times now, going back six years.

At my institution, I'm the only one teaching database design, whether undergrad or grad, and I found Power BI was a very attractive tool to introduce during the database design class, and then later enable the students to use it for their capstone. Unfortunately, it didn't work out in November this year, because few of the students picked up on it and gave the actual time it would take to focus their attention on using Power BI templates.

Overall, my observation is that the enrollment is way down and the students who are still in the program are very distracted, I think because of the pandemic. Despite this, Power BI has helped me introduce students to business intelligence and data analytics because it's a very attractive and cost-effective tool (there's no cost to it, it's free).

Another reason I'm inspired to focus my time on helping students with Power BI is because of the analyses done by the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, wherein they reviewed the strengths of Power BI. Both of them call it a "killer app". That caught my attention. And Power BI seems like the best thing to suggest to the students.

And I'm up to it on my side teaching through online, although I'm regretting that I cannot go on a campus to be still there for the students whose strong preference is to be together in a room learning on site. I hope that in the class in May, there'll be more people really interested in actually using it. In November, I was hoping some of the students would, but for reasons such as the pandemic, these online students have too many distractions. Especially if they're also still working or they have families with kids at home.

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We approve it for use with SAP BI, so it has been more effective for our users and much cheaper. So, the costs are small and the benefits are high.

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• We are running over 500,000 report annually.
• It provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting.
• It provides data feeds for AI.

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Previously, I was working for a retail company and when I got there, there weren't any analytics implemented yet.

So, what I did was, firstly, I implemented an EDW solution so as to gather all the possible data in a single repository.

After that, I developed a self-service model so the company could take advantage of their ad hoc analysis.

Then, I implemented some standard reports to understand some basic indicators, together with the delivery subscriptions so that all the organization's levels could receive this valuable information, i.e., for more than 500 users.

Lastly, I connected this platform to the cloud (Power BI) together with a top BI solution (QlikView) so as to take full advantage of the second data insights' step journey.

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One thing it's doing in the early stage of an implementation is, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected.

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It helps the decision-maker to make decisions related to the data. Power BI is easy to use and user friendly. Because of that, we use it as a visualization tool for our data.

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I had to build a simple dashboard in which I had to combine two or three different datasets. They were large enough, so it wasn't possible to work on them easily in Excel. In Power BI, I used the relationship feature, and I was able to store the data in such a way that it does not occupy a lot of space. I could then send the file over email.

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Works with data, systems and tools we already have. They are "additional" tools rather than complete replacement software.  Easy to upgrade / install.  The new SSRS tools in particular give us an easier way to share insights and reports to our clients and within our own teams.  Security is easily managed within SharePoint.

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It gives us accurate data and an easy way to navigate.

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Microsoft BI provides insights about the normal day-to-day work from operations or different transactions. It depends on the organization's business. It provides insights for top management to help them make more accurate decisions.

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It is a good and very useful product. I find it to be extremely useful because it gives me a deeper insight into my business, and it lets me analyze things and make decisions based on the data.

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Microsoft always believes in adding different features. We did have some issues building the Microsoft blog.

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• It is free. 
• SSAS and SSRS work great together. 
• There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code.

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We are using Power BI because it is one of the best tools. It has been very good for all situations. The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae.

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Microsoft SQL Server BI made data correlation between the agencies so fast, that the simple POCs for the dashboards let the decision-makers to migrate our so-called enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture is the integration of ETL, CDC, DWH, reporting, and forecasting tools.

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This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it. This is true even for business people who want to do a little bit of self-service. The whole thing has become quite simplified, as compared to what it was.

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In short, we had to create sales reports. The sales reports needed to be emailed to the different sales managers all across New Zealand. The Excel file data had to be filtered manually, whereas, in Power BI, you can set restrictions. For example, if you have North, South, East and West branches, you can set corresponding restrictions, while allowing the national sales manager to view the entire data without having to do a lot of filtering, because of the restrictions involved.

It is time-saving for the person who creates the report and also a lot of that is automated, whereas with Excel you've got to keep working on it and keep filtering it all the time.

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Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse.

SSRS improved our report delivery timings and the Power BI feature empowered the data users.

Power View improved the visualization of our reporting and dashboards.

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Because the product is based the ability to quickly produce BI insights and reports, it’s really useful on a daily basis. Another improvement is definitely the possibility of browsing the dashboards on smartphone using an app, and another is the ability to quickly produce reports.

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Other people can access data much more easily than before. Its usability is the main advantage, people in the company are using it.

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It helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management.

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By building the multi-dimensional database with Analysis Services, we were able to improve the performance of our reporting system. Now, our end-users can see the data stories quickly through Excel, Power BI tools, etc.

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We are a consultancy firm, helping our clients with billing and business intelligence solutions. We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way.

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In general, it's helping companies be more efficient, more productive.

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It has helped us to have a really quick view of the most important indicators of the operational issues of our platform. It has enabled collaboration between different operational levels in the company.

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Better insights, flexibility, and performance.

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It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves. We are getting adoption beyond original expectations.

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It cuts away the time spent to source some of this information. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of things have been automated. Things that used to take close to a week, now, in one day, we are done with it.

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In comparison to Excel, this is a much more powerful tool. 

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It has improved the organization because now we can connect Power BI directly with the Microsoft team. So it creates a more direct feed among the teams.

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This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data.

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Previously, we used Excel to perform the analysis. It was very tedious for them to get data into Excel, do the refresh, and generate the reports. Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it.

They get the data in the report section and they don't have to worry about report generation, data modeling, and other aspects.

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We cannot truly speak to improvements yet, as we are just exploring it. Potentially, it can provide instant access to a very current state of affairs for school performance.

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For a long time I had to do everything manually, and it took a long time. At the moment, I just have to refresh and I get my report. A few clicks are needed. Once I get the data in the right format, then I have the report as quickly as it is required.

It used to be stressful towards the month's end, to meet the deadline for reporting, especially when these reports are required by the board of the company. But now, as long as the other units give me my numbers on time, I don't waste a lot of time in preparing the numbers. I can now use my time in analyzing the outcome, rather than preparing the figures and cleaning up the data. It provides efficiency and saves time.

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It has been helpful in getting insights. We weren't able to get insights at such a level. It is also helpful in getting an overview of different departments. We are able to do it much faster than before.

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PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions.

With this solution, we were able to know which problems were critical and chronic. Once we used Power BI for production management, we realized that we could also use it for quality assurance, finance, and others types of management.

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• Giving visibility to management/business users about the business by mobility.
• Easy to develop and manage.

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It has helped us to have the information in a visual format, using graphical tools. Until now, we had to view the information on paper or in Excel files. With this tool, we can view the company's and departments' situation graphically.

It also gives us the flexibility to interact with the data. For example, we can see information for one year, or one month, or a given project, or two projects. And it produces the information very quickly.

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Automation. With MSBI, we realized automation from data loading, transformation and reporting.

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Reduced time to develop and deployment projects. View full review »

We did not previously have a BI platform before. This has helped us.

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We've not used it enough to be able to speak to organizational improvements.

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It is good for users who have experience with Excel but are looking to work with larger than Excel data sets. For experienced users, it is more of a hassle because of its lack of usability; it is not very intuitive to find a given functionality.

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If you don't have any analytical tool and you don't have any budget, then Power BI can be the best product in terms of the price-quality index. This is because you can work easily on big data; you can upload and model it.

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The use of the dashboards with analytics has helped our organization.

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It reduces the time needed to generate reporting for an organization, allowing management to have an overview of how the company performs. Afterwards, it allows the company to formulate strategies to improve itself.

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We provide BI solutions to the users at every level in order to monitor business. We can deploy DWH, cubes and reports from scratch within weeks of implementation.

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It's been stable for over eight years, and all the latest products/versions have backwards compatibility, or an upgrade facility. It has helped to fetch many projects, and to deliver them on time, as well as helping to resolve complex business challenges. The product has continual updates so we can stay on top of the market.

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I have tried SSRS and later moved to Power BI. SSRS requires every analytical feature to be implemented separately. However, with the appropriate granularity of data, you can drill down and drill up easily which gives you a different view of the dashboards. Now with having on-premises availability, it makes this tool even more powerful.

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We help customers deploy and analyze sophisticated analytics models. These models have helped them all to get a better insight into their data and many of them have found very valuable insights that made them more profitable, more efficient, and in some cases changed the direction of the business.

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Microsoft BI Stack improved the way our clients in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution) and the agro industrial sectors manage their financial reporting and board pack preparation, from one week to five minutes.

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It helps to create the board report pack for financial reporting.

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We empower users with Enterprise BI and Self Service BI by Microsoft BI.

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• Established a culture of management by indicators.
• Improvement of services
• Greater visibility of results

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