Power BI – For Self-Service Business Intelligence and Analytics at
Enterprise-Scale

Key Takeaways: 

1. Data engineers often choose Power BI when there is a need for self-service analytics at scale. It is a tool that seamlessly integrates with Excel, and business users find it to be intuitive, efficient, and secure.  

2. Power BI also comes with a range of pre-built data connectors – to unify data from multiple data sources including databases, CRM, ERP, and other applications.  

3. Merit’s Data Engineering Team often set up PowerBI to enable self-service for business teams. It is an ideal tool when you want to go as quickly as possible from “data to insight”.  

L’Oréal, one of the world’s leading brands for beauty products, is well-known for adopting cutting-edge technology. The company uses technologies like computer vision, 3D modeling, and augmented/virtual reality at various stages of its product lifecycle – from the lab to the customer. It also relies heavily on teamwork and collaboration, and the company uses various products from the Microsoft ecosystem to enable this.  

To enable data-driven decision-making, the company uses a proven combination of Microsoft Teams (for collaboration), Microsoft 365 (for documentation), and Power BI (for drawing insights). Using Power BI truly democratises access to data and allows anyone to share data, create dashboards and answer questions.  

From a business perspective, adding Power BI to the decision-making process helped with: 

• Seamless use of data for strategy formulation 
• Using data to drive change  
• Fact-based discussions and brainstorming  
• Improved productivity  

• Agile decision making  
• Using data better to power innovation initiatives  

Merit’s Senior Client Delivery Manager ,who has helped several clients implement enterprise scale BI solutions, says that “Power BI also helps with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) wherein policies can be defined and alerts can also be setup to monitor sensitive datasets.” 

Power BI – Not Just a Tool but a Platform 

Power BI, built on top of Azure, includes a collection of cloud-based apps and services that facilitate collating, managing, and analysing data from distributed sources with a user-friendly interface.  

Power BI makes it easy to uncover actionable insights by aggregating data and processes and presenting them with compelling visualisations. Its interactive dashboards are especially useful and can be shared with other stakeholders at the click of a button.  

Also, it is important to note that business users like to analyse data in Excel. With Power BI, it is easy to access real-time data within Excel to perform analysis at the individual level. One can also connect Power BI with various data sources, including ERP (both cloud and on-premise), CRM, PLM, eQMS, and other business systems your organization uses.  

It is available as a desktop application, called Power BI Desktop, or as SaaS, called Power BI Service. It can also be accessed on the mobile, compatible with Windows phones and tablets, iOS and Android devices. 

The Power BI platform is made up of the following components: 

• Power Query: Enables connecting, transforming, combining, and enhancing data from several sources 
• Power Pivot: To create data models 
• Power View: To generate interactive charts, graphs, and maps, among others 
• Power Map: To create immersive 3D visuals 
• Power Q&A: Ask questions to get answers from your data in plain language 

Unique Advantages of Power BI 

Based on the experience we’ve had at Merit, the biggest advantage of using Power BI is that it fits in seamlessly into your BI stack, irrespective of the other business application or cloud platform being used. It is easy to setup and since most people are familiar with Microsoft’s user interface, it is fairly intuitive.  

With Power BI, ingesting and cleaning data is streamlined. The Power Query tool makes the entire data transformation process extremely efficient. Additionally, data modeling (which is the underlying core of any BI tool) using Power Pivot is highly useful as well.  

Power BI provides a comprehensive view of both past and present data. It has machine learning capabilities to spot trends and explore “what if” scenarios. This can help with demand forecasting, supply chain planning, inventory management, and several other business processes. Power BI also offers image recognition and text analytics capabilities, which can be valuable to garner insights from unstructured data. It can be configured to create machine learning models that can be integrated with Azure Machine Learning. 

With Power BI, users can set alerts to track important metrics and KPIs. It seamlessly integrates with Office 365, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365, and non-Microsoft products like Hadoop, Spark, Google Analytics, SAP, Salesforce, and MailChimp.  

Power BI is a secure platform ensuring data safety at a granular level. It facilitates setting up row-level security so that only those authorized can access the data. It can be used across business functions including finance, marketing, sales, IT, human resources, and operations to gain insights.  

Merit Group’s expertise in Power BI  

Merit’s data engineers can help you with faster time-to-insights using Power BI, which is ideal for data exploration.   

Get in touch with our data and business intelligence teams for strategic guidance on building the right data ecosystem, custom-designed for your business. We’ll also help you choose the right data cloud platform based on your volume and/or types of data to be processed.  

If you’d like to learn more about our service offerings or speak to a data visualisation or Power BI expert, please contact us here: https://www.meritdata-tech.com/contact-us