Navigating your Project reports, even outside the planet with PowerBI

Navigating your Project reports, even outside the planet

PowerBI came out late 2014 offering reporting that “puts visual analytics at your fingertips with intuitive report authoring” and allowing businesses to “Connect to multiple datasets to bring all of the relevant data together in one place”. As promised the PoweBI platform allows us to connect to data (even from different sources), model it, analyze and refine, and then visualize it to help uncover insights.

Perhaps some have had the chance to see and experience Microsoft PowerBI and its many visuals, let’s have a look at one.

Location, Location, Location

One visual by Microsoft PowerBI is the built-in map visualization that allow data to be attached to its location on a world map. With the map visual the data filter and comparison is based on country or region. This has substantial impact

• Points out the added value for each business unit.
• Allow for planning and focusing on important regions
• Discover bottlenecks
• Understand issues/ opportunities that arise from location

However, using location based reporting has a much broader potential. New PowerBI functionality allows us to define regions in any images, and map data to the image in your Power BI report. The image can be anything; warehouse, store or construction floorplans, seat or venue layout, and even a process layout.

Visualize it

Think about a construction floorplan map with rooms and areas defined and the information attached to those. Information like costs, work timing, materials, issues etc.

Or, consider an event venue with bookable conference halls. The report could show revenue by room and time, but also show what rooms are least/most popular and when, leading to correct planning or focused marketing efforts.

Taking it further

Placing projects or tasks in different stages could trek internal processes simply by being able to see where things are located or rather ”stuck”. This can be done by allowing for unique organizational process image to be “mapped” and tasks attached to their current stage so they are monitored and driven forward while solving issues.

That is true BI – gaining insights from available data to improve, plan and focus business efforts.

To summarize…

The beauty of these reports is evident on the surface but it is not only skin deep. They are generated with information that each company works with every day, inputs that are recorded for every project and in every mundane task. Moreover, where once the production of reports was a time and resources consuming effort, due to the need to obtain correct info-structure and security, PowerBI is simple – with office 365 the foundations are already there.

PowerBI does offer many attractive and useful possibilities, that are simply put together and connected to organizational data, this was one example of those.

/Yaara Bercovici Malki