Businesses are always looking to try and improve their operations, whether that’s increasing profits or monitoring team performance. In most cases this is fulfilled by reviewing a report from an accounting package or creating a spreadsheet and generating some graphs.

A key drawback to this approach is that the decision makers requesting the information often can’t see the live data, only a snapshot when the report was generated. They also can’t quickly manipulate it to compare previous statistics and do “what if” comparisons.

There is an alternative. Business Intelligence (BI) software are products designed to integrate seamlessly with almost any software package or data source to give a live 360⁰ view of your business, often correlating data from different systems.

“Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.”- Suhail Doshi

There are many different BI platforms available, and it was important to us to select one that we know would work well for our clients. After a significant amount of research and in-house testing we chose to partner with Microsoft to deliver their flagship BI product, Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft is constantly innovating to integrate its products so that they seamlessly work together while maintaining a similar look and feel across their platforms. This integration eases the day-to-day use of BI analytics, for example a chart added to a PowerPoint presentation can continually update as the data changes.

This continued innovation has led to Power BI gaining leader status in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the 11^th consecutive year.

It’s important to note Power BI isn’t limited to visualising data from Microsoft products. It is able to take from literally hundreds of data sources – SAP, Sage Xero, QuickBooks, SQL Server, Microsoft Office applications (Access databases, Excel, etc.), MySQL, MailChimp, Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Analytics, Epicor – the list is endless and I’ve yet to come across anything it won’t touch.

If you are looking to get the most out of the data you may already have, get in touch with us to arrange a free initial consultation.