Coupa vs Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)

• Ease of use. No IT support is needed. As the procurement manager, I'm also the Coupa administrator. I have the ability to configure, correct, manipulate, etc., the system to our needs.
• No on-going training. The system, both P2P and Sourcing are incredibly intuitive. Many SAAS modules change dramatically with each new version and require additional training. Coupa does a great job of putting updated, searchable documents on-line to augment any additional training employees may need.
• Rock solid stability. Coupa is never down, they far exceed the SLAs we have in place with them. I've never had a catastrophic failure or outage with them.
• SOX compliancy. Need I say more? My internal and external audit teams have given the tool more than a passing grade.
• Thought leadership. The tool is constantly evolving to live up to the high expectations of its user base. The Coupa Community has skin-in-the-game and Coupa listens to our needs/wants as well as adding their own cutting edge touches to the tool.

Read full review

• Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
• Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
• Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
• Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
• Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.

Read full review

• Implementation using a third-party consultant was a mistake. Maybe we had the wrong consultants assigned to us but make sure you understand who is doing the implementation. Implementation is costly but extremely important.
• We often can have small issues with approval chains and they are hard to figure out. If there was more information on how to understand approval chains without reaching out to support, it would help.

Read full review

• Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
• Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
• Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.

Read full review

• The easy internal process to find. Given this is the same for all teams, I'd guess there is a positive impact from our Finance Team as they only have one tool they have to manage, pull reporting from, etc.
• Frustrating process, as mentioned at times this can be a frustrating tool to use, which I think causes a lot of employees (who are not on the Finance Team) to direct undue frustration towards the Finance Team, creating avoidable tensions.

Read full review

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.

Read full review