Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$14
per month per user
Motive
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Motive builds technology to improve the safety, productivity, and profitability of businesses that power the physical economy. The Motive Automated Operations Platform combines IoT hardware with AI-powered applications to automate vehicle and equipment tracking, driver safety, compliance, maintenance, spend management, and more. Motive serves more than 120,000 businesses across industries, including trucking and logistics, construction, oil and gas, food and beverage, field service, agriculture,…
Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.
This software is kept in my pocket at all times. I can access the dashboard right from my phone using the app. If a driver calls needing help I can help anywhere. The product is so easy to use that not much training is needed. Our team is able to pick up the app or jump on the dashboard and go.
One of the features I find frustrating to use is adjusting speed limits. Sure, when someone breaks a speed limit and it gives me an event I can go into the event and easily adjust the speed limit, but ONLY FOR THAT SECTION they sped in. If I need to adjust the speed limit for the whole road, thats another matter entirely. We work in the middle of no where so I have noticed there have been more examples of this than I would like. But I also understand they get their speed limit data the same as every other service so its not like Motive is behind, just limited to the data they receive.
I would like to be able to determine event criticality so that any event I want to be automatically assigned as "coachable" will be. Also in regards to the events page, I would like to see a way to select multiple events (maybe some check boxes to select the ones you want) and be able to assign them all to "coachable" or dismissed". Especially during implementation we are getting a lot of "obstructed view" and this is not going to count against their score, we just want to dismiss them after seeing who it is so we can address it. But we get 10 or 12 for each person and have to go into each one individually... It is just a little time consuming and I think the multi select functionality fixes that.
Currently maintenance reminders use engine hours OR miles. I would like to see the capability of using both. for example, a good estimate is 1 hour of engine idle time is equivalent to 30 miles driven. So if we set a 10,000 mile maintenance alert, I would want that to include the actual odometer reading (lets say 7,000 miles) and add the engine hours to miles conversion, lets say it has 100 idle hours (100x30 = 3,000). Hope that makes sense.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
When signing into Motive upon entering and starting motor vehicle, the app and the transmitting unit pair immediately. Once paired it is extremely easy and efficiently started to populate the necessary unit information. Then entering the Work Order info is seamlessly entered to the E- log. Doing the pre and post vehicle checks is completed quite accurately.
We have had a couple of issues with some GPSs not working properly. One is down right now, and we have to get it replaced because the GPS has already stopped working. Another was a cord issue. Otherwise, they have been working great with no issues.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.
Even after using the product for multiple years, Motive continues to have follow-up calls with us to ensure we are taking full advantage of the functionality offered, to show us new tools and modules that are being released, and to help solve any issues or troubleshooting that may be required.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
Our company used Qualcomm before getting Motive several years ago. Unfortunately, I was not working with the ELDs at that point. However, the majority of drivers say they like Motive more than Qualcomm. We have stayed with Motive due to its features, user support, and innovation with AI technology.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
