Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I primarily use Power BI for data visualization. I build dashboards on Power BI, which are then distributed to a larger audience for day-to-day operations, like data management and similar tasks. 

In some cases, I have used Power BI to manage very large data sets, which isn't possible with Excel, Access, or other tools. I created custom solutions on Power BI that allow users to cut and slice through the data we have. These are the two main use cases I've observed so far.

One of the key factors why I use Power BI is because it's very flexible with other Microsoft tools. The entire ETL process is easy and supports many databases, allowing data pipelines from multiple sources to be gathered in one place for visualization. This is the key aspect I like about it.

Power BI is our development visualization system for general analytics and data reporting. I position it on top of our data warehouse, SharePoint data, Excel data, or any available data. It is used for internal purposes, allowing network-wide access from physicians to nurses to operational leaders. We have upwards of 16,000 users.

Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.

My use case is not extensive because I am using a module of Eightfold. As a financial controller, I am not directly involved in recruitment myself. I have only seen it on someone else's screen, so I am not a good judge of the solution.

The main feature I find valuable is the possibility to work with an extensive amount of data. While you can achieve some of this with Excel, it takes much longer to perform calculations. 

Power BI processes data differently, efficiently utilizing memory for detailed-level processing. The visual capabilities are another significant advantage over Excel, though Excel continues to improve. Access, however, does not compare in terms of graphical evolutions like those in Qlik. 

Furthermore, the potential to use custom add-ons in Power BI is restricted if you do not use native Microsoft products, which is understandable for quality control. Ultimately, the ability to handle large volumes of data and provide dynamic selections is a considerable benefit. In today's data-driven environment, these tools are of substantial value, particularly for large enterprises with numerous processes that require extensive data analysis.

I use Microsoft Power BI to build dashboards and reports for people analytics. This includes headcount, attrition, service delivery, and data quality. All the reports my team and I produce are specifically for the HR or people functions.

I'm very focused on the ETL part of Microsoft Power BI. I particularly enjoy the Power Query functions and functionalities associated with that. In the organizations where I've worked with Microsoft Power BI, we never had an external data source. Most of the time we are working with data exports from various systems. I think Power Query within Microsoft Power BI is one of the more powerful features that I'm using.

The Power Query feature in Microsoft Power BI helps me with the extract, transformation, and load of data. I'm actually doing the majority of the data prep inside that part of the tool.

I appreciate the real-time data processing capabilities in Microsoft Power BI. We don't use them very often, unless we have a real-time data source. With the infrastructure available to me and the team in the organizations I've worked, we didn't manage to have real-time connections to the human capital management tools. One of the use cases I had was when we were collecting feedback from new joiners. It was a real-time data update because we connected Microsoft Forms, which was the source of data, to a real-time dashboard that we created in Microsoft Power BI. Each time someone submitted new feedback for their onboarding survey, the data would flow automatically without requiring manual intervention. This isn't the typical situation. More integrations for human capital management tools would be great, though it depends significantly on the organization.

There are so many use cases of Microsoft Power BI. For example, the first use case is in manufacturing automation, where clients in the ready-mix concrete sector are using it. We collect and analyze user and operator feedback to optimize operational performance in manufacturing while also taking data from their sales projections.

Role-wise, it is being created, and function-wise, we look at sales data from last year and the last quarter versus the current quarter to identify gaps and required run rates to meet sales goals. Microsoft Power BI predicts whether they will reach the previous year's sales and their desired target for this year based on current run rates, showing the optimized revenue needed per day to achieve their goals.

My customers are in other industries beyond manufacturing with Microsoft Power BI.

Currently, we are working with the finance sector; it's a non-banking financial company (NBFC) client, not a bank.

The demand estimation and forecasting profitability are the most effective features of Microsoft Power BI, along with vendor and supply chain risk analysis, inventory and stock forecasting, real-time production monitoring, and quality control through defect tracking and root cause analysis.

Most clients using Microsoft Power BI are also using ERP systems, so we pull data from their operational databases rather than Excel or Google Sheets; the data is synced in real-time or within a 7 to 15-day window based on client needs.

Microsoft Power BI is easy to integrate with other solutions; regarding AI, it supports machine learning projects for customers.

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence tool, and we take the data which was preprocessed, refined, cleaned, transformed, and loaded so that it can be used by Microsoft Power BI to get insights from it.

We represent the data using various visualizations such as bar charts and diagrams. By utilizing these functionalities, we gain better insights about the data. It also provides connectivity through various data sources such as SSIS, SSAS, Azure SQL, Synapse Analytics, and Data Lake, allowing Microsoft Power BI to be used efficiently. Additionally, it plays a major role in ETL tasks as well.

The interactive elements in Microsoft Power BI enable us to perform drill-up, drill-down operations, and drill-throughs, and the various types of visualizations, including charts, graphs, maps, matrices, tables, and slices, make it highly adaptable for different case scenarios. The measures help us carry out aggregations and calculations to provide the necessary business insights, such as representing total sales or tracking growth year by year.

For business use cases, real-time data from Microsoft Power BI could be very impactful. With AI in Microsoft Power BI, when we ingest the data and use the GenAI tools at our disposal, AI helps automate the process and represent the visualizations to our customers and clients. For instance, if we want to analyze the growth pattern in the last quarter, the tools can assess the visualization presented and provide us with specific responses.

The interactive elements in Microsoft Power BI enable us to perform drill-up, drill-down operations, and drill-throughs, and the various types of visualizations, including charts, graphs, maps, matrices, tables, and slices, make it highly adaptable for different case scenarios.

The measures help us carry out aggregations and calculations to provide the necessary business insights, such as representing total sales or tracking growth year by year.

With AI in Microsoft Power BI, when we ingest the data and use the GenAI tools at our disposal, AI helps automate the process and represent the visualizations to our customers and clients. For instance, if we want to analyze the growth pattern in the last quarter, the tools can assess the visualization presented and provide us with specific responses.

The low-code, no-code feature in Microsoft Power BI is quite beneficial for business analysts and related associates to work better with it and create meaningful and valuable insights.

There are multiple workflows used in SharePoint and Salesforce. In ServiceNow, workflows are generated for each of the corporate functions such as HR, finance, ORM and others.

Microsoft Power BI is used extensively throughout the organization.

We are seeking agentic AI or analyzing AI which can help automatically analyze requirements and create workflows. Currently, we are creating these manually and must be involved in end-to-end testing. This involves two major parameters. To reduce the need for highly skilled personnel, we can engage someone who is just familiar and has a basic understanding of Microsoft Power BI, while AI can handle the major tasks through either agent AI or requirement analysis.

For example, as a lead, I can produce requirements that can be fed to the AI, which can then generate the workflow. It may also recommend how testing should be conducted, and test cases can be automatically generated by the agentic AI.