This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.
Every business from startup to larger established businesses needs to track details about their customers, products, sales, purchases, social media, website logs to name a few. By extracting, manipulating and analyzing this data you can determine key metrics to help you understand more about your customers and grow your business. In part 1 we talked about how to kick start your data warehousing with BI360 and now we need to know what to do with all this data.
Basically you can use your Data Warehouse for financial statement reporting and analysis, dashboards and data mining. I previously went through how to use BI360’s One Stop Reporting here (link to Part 5 – BI Series Nov 2013) so I will be talking more about data mining and .
Many of the projects that I’ve been working on over the last 12 months have evolved integrating data into a data warehouse. Specifically companies are looking to import more data from other systems to do various types of analysis. Data integration is nothing new, companies have been doing it for a long time, but usually with a very manual process that includes vast Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
What Is a Data Warehouse?
A data warehouse is a database designed to enable reporting and data analysis activities. Data warehouses store current and historical data from one or more disparate sources. Some of these sources may include:
We have put a lot of hard work into this blog series with building a patron analysis so now it’s time to share the wealth of our analysis insights with the rest of the company. Power BI’s web site and mobile approach with the deployment of Office 365 and refreshable data through a Data Management Gateway, is the perfect solution. The Data Management Gateway has come a long way since the first version and with version 1.2 it now supports many data source types from Power Query connections.
Perhaps you wish to provide your Sales Reps with the Customer Statement from Dynamics GP or a report which summarizes order history. We would be able to use pre-filtering to only pull orders in GP for the Account in question or if your Sales Rep is on the road, still allow them to print out a Customer Statement without having to us a VPN to access GP. Great! So, I’ll just upload the report I created into CRM and be able access my external data. Not so fast.
The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. It also appropriately characterizes one of the main goals of data visualization, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly.
The point of Power View is to make it very easy to create pretty, interactive data presentations or reports that will make your boss go “Wow, how did you do that? You’re a genius!” Well, OK, maybe not that far but you’ll definitely look smart. Plus, it also can be used to explore your data visually without worrying about messing anything up and even make reports on your own, without IT help.
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