Business Analytics
Analytics is more than reporting. We believe that all businesses need analytics to identify issues and opportunities across the organisation, and intervene to resolve and realise them. Use analytics to drive better business outcomes. Analytics helps you to get data out of your core business systems and turn it into decisions.
What is analytics?
Analytics describes solutions through which organisations and their users can visualise, model, interpret, act on, and share their business data. You may call it reporting or business intelligence.
In all scenarios, regardless of the terminology, analytics is about action and driving better business outcomes based on the knowledge analytics provides.
Every business analytics solution should be focused on the key decisions required to deliver these outcomes.
You should be using analytics to act on examples like the following:
- Where are we unprofitable?
- Which customers are unhappy?
- Why are we wasting product?
- Why are we not fulfilling all of our orders?
- How can I fix it?
Why does my business need analytics?
‘Reporting’ is what we all do to review historical performance. Reports like ‘current year sales vs prior year sales vs budget’ are our rear-view mirror. Monthly reporting packs tell us that something is wrong – but not what or why – much less support a plan to resolve the issue.
We can see the company's results, but the key issues are hiding out of sight and you need to ask for more reports, more detail. It's not forward-looking and it's not dynamic enough to help you isolate actions to drive:
- Maximising staff utilisation
- Preventing the loss of perishable stock
- Ensuring the ability to fulfil customer orders
Reporting doesn't provide answers to these questions easily and automatically. With traditional business reporting, answers take a considerable amount of time to find out, wading through data with manual analysis and duplicated effort and different ways of producing the same report.
Evolve beyond reporting
‘Analytics’ is about changing future business outcomes, which is what we are all paid to do. Analytics is about action – using data to identify, monitor and improve the things that really drive your business.
Reporting evolves to become exception-based and outcome-focused.
Our aim is to help businesses evolve beyond traditional reporting and into discovery and intervention.
The next step is about discovering what analytics could bring to your business and how to go about achieving that.
Discover what analytics can bring
What can analytics bring to my business?
By defining the outcomes you want to achieve, analytics can bring a focus to your business. This gives you a target to aim for, a path forward and a clearly selected goal.
You'll need the right 'lens' to focus on each of the outcomes you have chosen, which is where The Power People come in. We are experts in crafting these 'lenses' for businesses, as well as helping them on their journey to actionable insights.
In crafting each 'lens', we start by understanding the actionable outcomes and decisions that you want to drive, and evaluate the sources of data that might be used to support them. Then we work out how those data sources might be combined to deliver the new insight that you are looking for.
How do I bring analytics to my business?
When first meeting with The Power People, our objectives will be to:
Listen and Discover
- Action: What decisions are you trying to better inform? What are the pain points in the business? What are the key issues that keep you awake? These are the things that we will want to target with analytics - 'decision support'.
- Insight: This is the deliverable. Often it is a dashboard, designed around the actions identified in the previous step. This could also be a contained analysis project to produce a report and recommendations.
- Data: The source! Only now do we consider what is held within the business and externally that is necessary to deliver the insights. How clean is the data? How is it captured? Is it viable in its current form? Can we access all data sources? Is a data warehouse needed?
The Power People's Offering
Once we have listened to you and discovered your needs, we then aim to show you the solution in action, alongside our project methodology, and give you a chance to see what's possible.
How do we get started?
- Explore: We begin with the 'Day in the Life' methodology. This includes detailed scoping, capturing requirements, outcomes and lenses. Then we explore your data sources, followed by documenting the data model plan and intended design. Finally, we playback what we've found as a plan.
- Build: When the plan has been approved, then we start to build! We aim for the minimum viable product at this stage, delivering all of the scoped requirements. Then we proceed into User Acceptance Testing (UAT), validation and delivery.
- Fit and finish: At this point, we discuss your 'wouldn't it be great if...' ideas and make tweaks, changes and additions based on this. We also make ongoing iterations to what we've built as users continue to explore and familiarise themselves with the solution. Finally, we organise training and ongoing support to make sure you get the absolute best out of your new solution.
Power BI
Our business analytics solution of choice for this is Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is an interactive tool built to visualise data and provide actionable insights from that data.
Power BI is Microsoft's analytics solution, providing businesses with:
- A live, interactive, automated visualisation tool
- The ability to distribute reports via browser or mobile app
- Native integration with Teams, SharePoint and the Power Platform
This solution can be used to integrate with many data sources, including your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, your CRM, your third-party warehousing solution, and much more. We're huge fans of what this solution is capable of and what it could bring to your business, alongside our project methodology.
The Data Doctor
Do you recognise these problems caused by traditional reporting? Are you interested in discovering the data in your business causing those issues? Our analytics specialists are eager to help you progress to discovery and intervention using analytics and Power BI.
With our Data Doctor offering, one of our consultants review the data and reporting estate in your business, make observations, and identify any key issues. We provide recommendations and a plan for the future, based on our extensive expertise.
Speak to our team today and step forward on your journey to insightful and meaningful analytics at your fingertips.
Talk to us today for honest advice
Why choose The Power People?
The Power People team are specialists in using Power BI as a business analytics solution. We have people with a range of expertise in business analysis, database infrastructure, data modelling and visualisation, all supported by the encyclopaedic knowledge of Microsoft ERP within TNP.
All of us together, applying our well-established project methodology, ensure that we deliver to you a valuable action-focused analytics solution.
We deliver end-to-end projects or you can think of us as an extension of your own team, where we can assist you in any way your business needs. This could be guidance and support, all the way through to a finished solution.
Power BI Training
Our Power BI specialists regularly conduct free of charge training on Power BI. The one-day course aims to provide you with the ability to:
- Create reports using Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central data, allowing you to support your business' analytical goals
- Familiarise yourself with the basics of Power BI using the knowledge of one of our Consultants
- Understand how to use Visualisations, Data Modelling, Report Design and how to publish the reports to PowerBI.com
Sign up today for our free Power BI training course, which is usually held twice a month. Save your place using this link.
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