Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 8
Author: Jay Mistry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Power BI is a powerful tool to visualize data sets and provide easy deep dive analysis into your data. It is a great extension to Excel and easy to pick up with minimal training. It is able to address many of the business challenges faced by CPG organizations from financial analysis, supply chain management, factory optimization, and so forth.

Pros and Cons

Load large volumes of data quickly and efficiently.
Great visualizations to provide insights into your data.
Table view provides quick at a glance to trouble shoot issues with data.
Sharing and publishing can be done in minutes.

Overlay objects or being able to insert an object into another object.
Make it easier so different groups of people have access to different tabs.
Improve connections to data source when accessing via Sharepoint.

Return on Investment

Helped to reduce operating costs and bring efficiencies
Helped to reduce use of Excel workbooks and move to more automation
Reduced the number of days when reporting information is available

Alternatives Considered

Qlik Analytics Platform

Similar products however Qlik much better at handling very large volumes of data whilst Power BI easier for back end loading and requires less coding. Power BI much easier to publish and share via server. End-to-end processing from desktop to publishing to sharing can be done in very minimal time. Power BI does not require programming people to build the dashboards.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Power BI delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Power BI's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Power BI live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Power BI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Qlik Analytics Platform, SAP BW/4HANA

Usability

Power BI features are almost limitless from the loading stage, table views, dashboard building to publishing and sharing. DAX provides a powerful feature to meet challenging calculations and complex processes. Visualizations help to bring out insights and help end-users to make better and faster decisions without the need for an army of analysts to produce multiple reports offline.

Support Rating

Support for Power BI is very extensive with many online chat groups and plenty of resources via search engines. Within the organization, we have a number of chat groups and training and support from IS/IT teams. Cross-functional collaboration is also helping to support functional areas to share, learn & grow the Power BI platform.

Likelihood to Recommend

Power BI is well suited for flat file databases, although the pivot column feature can help other types. Particularly great where visualizations can provide better insights than data tables so great for deep insights into trend evolution. Can be challenging to build profit & loss statements with subtotals and percentages based on sales as one single neat statement.

A powerhouse for deep insights and better decision making

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI