Applying Power BI to your business

In Part 2 of our series looking at Power BI, Peter Filitz, CTO Mark Rotherham and Head of the Data Services Michael Gleeson explore the versatile applications of Power BI for businesses of all sizes. 

We cover the significance of tailoring Power BI services to meet different customer needs, the impact of shifting from outdated Excel reports to dynamic, real-time Power BI dashboards and discuss come case study that show how this journey can lead to a more effective business and substantial cost savings.

Pete, Mike and Mark also touch on how BCN projects integrate Microsoft Fabric, use innovative data visualisation pipelines, and how AI comes into the picture with large language models. 

An important listen for any business professional looking to leverage the power of their data.

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Transcript

Peter: 0:03

Hello and welcome to today's podcast. In today's podcast, we'll be looking at use cases for Power BI and how it can be applied to your business. I have the pleasure of speaking to both Mark and Michael again, who joined us for the first episode. Gentlemen, welcome and thank you for your time. Thanks. Glad to be back again. So, Mark, why don't you give us a quick recap on what we discussed on episode one just to give our audience or for those who didn't catch the first episode, just a quick overview in terms of Power BI and the managed services that BCN provide on that side of things.

Mark: 0:39

Yeah, sure. So I guess the the key takeaways from episode one were, you know, we've got this great Power BI platform from Microsoft, and it's extremely powerful, it's uh accessible. Uh and what BCN are trying to do with their managed service is um marry up the right service to the right customer needs, whether that's light touch, keeping the lights on, whether it's more hand-holding through hard and tricky development, or actually handing over the full end-to-end management of the Power BI ecosystem for us to run for you. So we've we've basically got a flexible approach that will meet you where your need is, that will tailor to give you the outcomes that you need. And the whole goal with this is so that you don't fall into some of the pitfalls that we've experienced in the past. And actually we can help accelerate your data journey by using our experience that we've got through the team to really help you um make your data work for you. And that's really what we want to do in all of this kind of data discussion is get data working for you better so that you can make data decisions and be more successful going forward.

Peter: 1:45

Thanks, Mark. That's a great overview. I guess over to you, Mike. Let's talk a little more about what you and the team are doing around Power BI and the managed services for businesses in the sort of small to medium sector. Because am I right in saying, you know, Power BI these days, it's not just the large multinational enterprise businesses. We're seeing businesses of all different shapes and sizes, industries and sectors taking advantage of this technology that's been made available to us by Microsoft. Care to share some of your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1: 2:17

Yeah, thanks, Peter. Um, yeah, I I think the way that I kind of like to categorize it sometimes is that we do have different sizes of companies, but actually every company will see the value in data now. And I think that people are becoming more data-driven in life and in work, but especially in the work scenario. If I break it down into the different types of customers we're we're kind of seeing, we we can probably segment them up and have a look at how they would use the managed service. So if I started off with uh an enterprise-wide customer who might want a fully managed service, well, they might have their own in-house data teams that are quite mature and just have large data sets that are holding data warehouses and have multiple different data sources and have a need for thousands of different Power BI dashboards with different levels of access that people can get across the organization. So that's a larger client and they have a certain need for it. Well, what I see in terms of an SMB or the SME market is that there's lots of different data sources across them as well, that are just not on as large a scale. So we've recently just done a project with a customer and they had uh lots of financial data, lots of data from CRM, lots of data from a website. Um they were trying to look at which days they were doing the most sales on and all the different scenarios around how they actually generated the most revenue in certain areas, and they were doing that all in Excel. So they'd have a management meeting every single month, and they were using data which somebody had spent days pulling together, and they were they were doing it in Excel. And by the time they had the meeting, the data was out of date. So, what we did for them was that we we used data flows and basically connected to all the SaaS applications, so the finance system, the CRM system, and we pulled data from the website. Doing that, we were able to create a reporting suite for them. The reporting suite allowed them to get access in real time to the business data, which allowed them to make business decisions on trends. So now their management team use that in every management meeting. In fact, they they use it more than that, they use it all the time. And it's driven a lot of cost saved to the business, but more importantly, it's helped them focus on where the revenue generators were. And you know, safe to say that they've been really impressed with what they've got so far, and it's added a lot of value to the organization. I think one thing to point out with that is as well, uh, these aren't, you know, massive, really expensive, long-winded projects that take months or years. Actually, they're agile delivery projects which can take a matter of weeks. So the speed to value, I think, as Mark said earlier, is really quick. So it makes these types of things more accessible to the SME and SMB market.

Peter: 5:06

Yeah, that's that's so true. And and am I right in saying uh I think one of the the big advantages I noticed with having played a bit with Power BI reports is how interactive they are, right? So it's not just staring at a single page with a bunch of graphs on. You can interact with the data, you can drill down to understand why it's reporting what it's reporting. And as such, gives you much better insight into what's going on in your business. Am I right in saying that's all fully customizable for each client? So you can build custom reports based on what they need and what their data sets are.

Speaker 1: 5:45

Yeah, that that's right, Peter. So um, you know, the point of Power BI is that it's interactive, and I think the key selling point to it is the usability. So all the dashboards that we build, uh, people will interact with them all the time. And as you said, you can drill into it, you can look at trends, you can do various different things with it. Um there's things like data alerts, so you can have it so they alert you when certain things happen. There's lots of different features within it. There's probably too many to be able to go into and use all of them. Um, but that's a good thing because actually you generally have something that's usable for every company that you're going to speak to. So I think, yeah, to kind of summarise that, that it's interactive. It's normally the data's in real time if you need it to be, or you know, based on what your data sets are, and it's accessible on multiple different devices, and you can do it so it's accessible at different hierarchies across your organization. And what that means is that if you want somebody in one area to be able to see everything, and then somebody that's a manager in a different area just to see that, when they interact with the dashboard, they can only see the data that you want them to.

Peter: 6:52

Yeah, that's so important. So, you know, again, security is maintained around potentially sensitive information. Now, just going back to the case study that that you were referencing, uh what were some of the key takeaways from that that we can share with the audience? I know you mentioned a few things there around, you know, efficiencies, better visibility. You know, I think giving the business the insight into trends and analysis of how their business is operating is important because they can more readily react to potential issues that might be negatively impacting the business or or their clients. Is there anything else you can think of that we could add?

Speaker 1: 7:35

I think one of the one of the key things with some of the projects we do with the SME or SMB clients are again, it's the speed to value. Quite a lot of the customers are surprised at how quickly we can interact with different data sets or connect to them and then produce dashboards that are meaningful for them. So I think that is key. And you know, it's one thing that I would you know recommend people explore because you know, it's not like an old IT project, you know, 20 years ago that might have taken a year to do these, you know, we can do these in kind of days or weeks. The ROI on the projects because of the speed are generally pretty good. Um, if you've got people that are messing around with Excel, you know, we all love Excel still, but actually there's quicker and better ways to do things now. So if you've got multiple people that are doing things in Excel, there's generally a better way of doing it. So your ROI on time spent in terms of manipulating data, it can be pretty rapid. Accessibility, I think that's key. What we're finding is that people don't realise how much they need data until they've given it to them. And then once they've been given it, you know, we we get a lot of feedback on kind of management or managing directors that are working at organisations, and they're finding that because they're accessing real-time data and they can do it on the train or when they're in a meeting on an iPad or on the telephone, they start to use data in a different way. And I think that kind of comes out in a lot of the projects that we're doing.

Peter: 9:04

Thanks, Mike. That's really useful and and insightful. Now, looking to the future, um, any exciting projects that you guys are working on that you can share with us? Always good to get uh an inside track as to what's next.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Yeah, I can just go up through a couple of them and then I'm sure Mark can because he's um more technical than I am. But from a non-technical perspective, you know, uh fabrics come out now from Microsoft, and I think a lot of the projects that we're doing, we're now looking at whether you can do it in Microsoft Fabric. So we're using pipelines to ingest data and then Power BI to visualize it. So this is probably a different way than what most people have done before when they were looking at how data was going to be used, and we're also doing a lot of different projects in the AI space or looking at large language models, which Mark generally gets involved with because it's it's too complicated for me. But there's some really clever stuff that people are doing with data now, and we're lucky enough because we work for BCN and we've got um 35 data engineers and Power BI developers now, which is a pretty big team that we can get involved with these types of projects because we've got the skill sets to be able to do it.

Mark: 10:18

Yeah, I think one of one of the other things just to kind of call out here is that not only are we deeply embedded in lots of our customers doing data visualization and data projects with Power BI, but we've actually got one of our own products that is a Power BI visual that you can download to the App Store, which is quite an innovative little visual that brings together SPC as a concept into Power BI charting. So it kind of just shows some of the really cool things you can do with Power BI when you you can start to crack it open and think about the art of the possible. So working with one of our bigger customers, we've created this and actually packaged up a really cool capability. So yeah, the innovation that comes with Power BI kind of goes two ways. One is you know what can you do out of Power BI and how are you going to get even more value out of it. But then as as Mike's touched on, you've now got a really good grip of your data. So what else can you do with it? And that's where we see some of the really exciting opportunities where we can bust out and use data in different ways, whether that's using Synaps to provide uh more detailed analytics that can then be fed into Power BI, or burst out further into things like large language models where we can do even more next-gen things that um a few years ago we probably uh wouldn't have even dreamed of being able to do. So it's really interesting to see that everyone's on their journey. There's a maturity curve with data. Some are starting off right at the beginning with I've got Excel and pivot tables and you know what do I do next? Others are at the other end where you know we we've got quite a good grip of their data. They've been using it for years. Uh, we've helped them build really, really detailed analytics within Power BI. And now they're they're doubling down on that investment and pushing even further by using the rest of the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem to get more value. So um, yeah, it's uh it's a fun journey to be on, and there's a lot of value to be had on it.

Peter: 12:11

Yeah, it's a journey and it's a journey that that is unlikely to end given how data is increasingly becoming a topic of conversation in most businesses and is obviously the underpin and driver for the industry that we are in. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us today. As always, pleasure having you, and look forward to welcoming you on our next episode where we will be talking more about how you can get ready for Power BI.

Mark: 12:40

Thanks, Peter. Speak to you soon. Thanks, Peter. We'll get you in the next one.