How Power BI Consultants Can Help Address Reporting Challenges

Do you find that your business’s data sets are getting more significant and challenging to work with? Are you able to derive meaningful insights and make informed decisions from this raw data? And last but not least, do you genuinely understand it?

If you answered no to any of these questions, then you are not alone. Big data is everywhere in research. Unfortunately, says Tracy Teal, it’s a kind of labor that’s too often left out of scientific training. Thence, the question that intrigues most businesses is how they can get intelligent and valuable insights cost-effectively.

Interestingly, cleansing and preparing data collected from various sources to extract useful information is the crux that augments good decision-making and strategies. A business needs to leverage a business intelligence tool to report on data and derive the insights they need to target the right customer segment and grow revenue.

For instance, one of the most promising tools in this segment, Microsoft Power BI, helps capture data from disparate sources, including cloud-hosted/on-premises applications (Excel or databases). These interactive Power BI dashboards depict data visualizations using graphs and charts that enable businesses to acquire insights through custom reports with just a few clicks.

Now, let’s delve into the reporting challenges that lead to business disruptions and how taking assistance from a Power BI consultant can help mitigate these concerns.

Reporting Challenges

Challenge #1 Reporting with Unstructured Data

Report generation is an arduous task- it involves processing crucial data gathered from diverse channels in varied formats. Organizations rely on different departments for data collection, and it is not always feasible to validate the data quality. Mostly, the captured data is unstructured and difficult to analyze, which impacts business decision-making adversely. Organizations, thus, have to invest hugely in cleaning, modeling, and structuring the data to perform business intelligence functions. Additionally, visualizing the volumes of data generated by boundless devices in today’s age is the biggest challenge for enterprises.

Solution:

Power BI’s robust data modeling capabilities enable users to transform unstructured data into structured formats suitable for analysis. With features like Power Query and Dataflows, users can easily clean, transform, and enrich unstructured data, turning it into actionable insights. This empowers organizations to derive meaningful correlations and trends from diverse data sources, enhancing decision-making processes. By leveraging the power of NLP, Power BI enables users to interact with data using simple, natural language queries.

Power BI implementation boosts accessibility and visibility of the insights by bringing and processing the data collected from different sources on a single platform. With an ability to handle vast amounts of data, Power BI eliminates manual processing making the data organization and insight-generation instant and accurate.

In addition, it seamlessly connects with data sources, applications, and services, including Office 365, SQL Server, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Google Analytics, etc. Integrating a Power BI solution having automatic ETL capabilities addresses the concern of processing unstructured data sets.

Challenge #2 Secure Collaboration with Teams

As we have earlier realized that the data for creating reports is collected from various departments. Still, the challenge is that interpreting and acting upon the gathered information varies from team to team. Lack of collaboration among teams to compile all data into a helpful business-focused report is one of the eminent issues.

Most organizations encounter the problem of identifying which report is recently updated and which employee or team should access the generated insights. Also, mapping the achieved outcomes to the defined metrics for assessing the performance becomes cumbersome in the absence of a collaborative ecosystem.

Solution

Power BI allows sharing dashboards with teams and employees that help them collaborate on an intuitive platform to share the data and review the insights generated based on key business metrics. You can use various security permissions to safeguard critical business data from unauthorized access. Relevant permissions can also be granted to the teams and share the link to a specific dashboard via email. Users can view and interact with the dynamic report components manipulating the data and information based on the granted rights. Isn’t this a holistic analytical solution offered by the Power BI platform?

Challenge #3 Real-Time Reports with Extensive Details

Indeed, a big challenge for businesses.

Most analytics tools do not provide detailed insights up to the expected level of reporting. Drilling down the data in real-time is a challenging task as generally, the reporting tools deliver a restricted level of insights on the captured and stored data.

Dynamic figures behind the underlying data lead to a range of anomalies. Locating the specific data source, understanding the cause, and making adjustments is quite challenging for organizations to perform analytics and attain a peculiar level of reporting.

Solution

It is another area where Power BI can help. It facilitates dynamic reporting that does not require any coding or comprehensive analytical skills. Power BI’s drag-and-drop functionality simplifies the process of building reports and dashboards. Users can easily drag data fields onto a canvas and arrange them to create customized visualizations tailored to their specific needs. This seamless workflow eliminates the need for complex coding or scripting, allowing users to focus on analyzing data rather than wrestling with technical intricacies.

Any authorized user in the organization can leverage the data-driven analysis to generate intelligent insights hassle-free. Power BI offers a suite of advanced analytics features, including predictive analytics, Machine Learning, and statistical modeling tools. These features enable users to uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations within their data, driving predictive insights and informed decision-making. Whether it’s forecasting sales trends, identifying customer behavior patterns, or optimizing business processes, Power BI’s advanced analytics capabilities empower organizations to extract actionable insights from their data effortlessly.

How Power BI Consultants Can Help Addressing Reporting Challenges

Reaching out to a Power BI consulting services provider that has proven expertise in deploying, integrating, and implementing Power BI can aid in resolving various business intelligence reporting concerns-

1. BI Strategy

Power BI implementation and reporting require an in-depth understanding of the business intelligence platform and its functions. A readiness check by a Power BI consultant to help identify the KPIs for the reporting in the Power BI dashboard. Strong BI strategy and roadmap creation leave no space for data analytics anomalies, promoting accelerated business performance.

Custom Power BI Development

To address every business’s distinct data analytics and reporting needs, custom dashboard development services are offered by Microsoft BI consultants. Integrating an interactive, user-friendly dashboard that allows custom report generation to existing applications and services is a rigorous process that can be accomplished by associating with a Power BI consulting service provider.

2. Power BI Deployment & Integration

Experienced BI professionals follow a step-by-step approach to overcome Power BI implementation challenges after identifying business problems and prioritizing business outcomes to be achieved. It is always recommended to approach a BI consulting services company with far-reaching competencies in implementing Power BI, dashboard development for reporting, and visualizations creation to avoid contingencies.

3. Data Modeling and Transformation

Power BI consultants assist enterprises in structuring and modeling their data to support reporting and analytics requirements effectively. They leverage Power BI’s data modeling tools, such as Power Query and DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), to clean, transform, and enrich data, ensuring its accuracy and consistency. Consultants also implement best practices for data modeling, such as creating relationships between tables and defining calculated columns and measures, to facilitate robust analysis.

4. Data Governance and Security

Ensuring data governance and security is paramount in maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of enterprise data. Power BI consultants help organizations implement robust governance frameworks, including role-based access control (RBAC), row-level security, and data encryption, to enforce data access policies and protect sensitive information. They also advise on data retention policies, data lineage tracking, and compliance with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA.

5. Training and Adoption

Driving user adoption is key to realizing the full potential of Power BI within an organization. Power BI consultants provide comprehensive training and support to empower business users with the skills and knowledge needed to leverage Power BI effectively. They conduct workshops, webinars, and one-on-one coaching sessions, covering topics such as report authoring, data visualization best practices, and self-service analytics. Consultants also provide ongoing support and guidance to address user queries and challenges, ensuring a smooth transition to Power BI.

To Sum Up

Though integration of Power BI supports organizations to get an edge in business intelligence with real-time data analytics and visualizations, it takes enormous time and expert know-how of the deployment and implementation processes. Connecting with a Power BI consulting company for integration services can let you focus on prime business goals by addressing the challenges mentioned above in business reporting. Need some assistance? Get in touch with our experts today!