Visualise; because an image is always more powerful than words!

Whilst no one can ignore the power of raw data in the form of data tables (i.e. rows and columns), obtaining an insight from raw data is not an easy task. Such data needs to be modelled, summarised and filtered. No wonder then, that we prefer to create a chart or graph in order to communicate the information easily and effectively to the wider audience.

However, within an enterprise, the required effort to produce this form of visualisation is riddled with inaccuracies as data is often downloaded and processed offline. As a result, most of the management information becomes questionable. Based on recent study, less than 10% of transactional data is actually used by the decision makers while formulating company policies which impacts the organisation and its people. Often, when deep-dive exercises are conducted, consultants find that data sets were pointing in the opposite direction compared to the management information prepared by traditional methods. Therefore, quite often, such synopsis of management information is based on gut-feel, extremely narrow data sets and invalidated assumptions.

Make decisions based on real-time transactional data.

Business Intelligence tools enable you to make decisions based on real-time data captured from different operational data sources, harmonised and filtered in real-time so as to provide powerful reporting and visualisation through very user-friendly and graphical representations.

Customers often misunderstand analytics or BI tools as extensions of what they can already achieve with spreadsheets. However, the truth is that the BI technologies are much superior and more powerful than offline spreadsheet tools.

Five simple reasons to implement BI and Analytics in your business:

• BI and Analytics can be directly deployed on disparate data sets and these tools can manage extremely large volume of transactional data from your OLTP systems
• BI engines can combine structured and non-structured data, where non-structured data often comes from external systems such as social media (e.g. customer sentiment, customer feedback and buying behaviour)
• Visualisation capabilities of these tools are much superior when compared with Excel. The visualisation approaches can be re-programmed and adjusted based on your organisation’s reporting requirements. Whilst Excel can generate charts and graphs, visualisation techniques can provide insight due to the manner in which the visualisations are designed
• Implementing organisation standards on reporting has been a challenging task. BI and Analytics enables you to achieve a uniform reporting at different levels within your organisation where a final organisation dashboard can simply reflect a mash-up of reporting built for different departments/divisions
• You can trust what visualisations tell you, because you can drill-down and validate your assumptions through data

Which tools should you use?

Like any other software, there is no concept of ‘one size fits all’. There are a number of organisations who have developed these tools and they have been appropriately evaluated by industry experts. We have delivered number of engagements involving Business Objects, Power BI where data was extracted and consolidated from multiple sources and subsequently refined for management reporting and dashboard generation.

Don’t just take our word for it. Give us a call and we’ll prove how Power BI leads the way.

We have solutions tailored for specific industries.

We have developed, industry specific visualisations for various industries using re-calibrated real-life data sets. We would be happy to demonstrate them to you. We can also work with you to create a demo based on real data from your operational systems to demonstrate the value of these tools.