As online businesses become more prevalent, the need to gain valuable business insights using customer data has become non-negotiable. However, most companies are at a disadvantage as they lack the specialised skills, manpower, or training to put popular data analysis platforms to good use.
In 2011, Microsoft solved this challenge by introducing Project Crescent. This tool would eventually be renamed Power BI in 2013 and included in the Office 365 suite. The platform allows non-technical users to perform actions like aggregation, analysis, visualisation, and sharing of data, with minimal training—especially if they’re familiar with the Microsoft Excel interface.
Thanks to the platform’s ease of use, affordability and interactivity, among others, over 67,000 businesses all over the world rely on it as their business intelligence tool. In this article, we identify the industries that can be transformed the most by using the tool’s capabilities.
The Healthcare Industry
The love of life, they say, is the root of all good. With Power BI, Microsoft seems to have demonstrated a commendable love for life. Several data-related challenges plague the healthcare industry. For one, they manage vast amounts of data and must ensure the privacy and security of these data. Also, they are faced with making on-the-spot decisions that can be the difference between life and death.
With Power BI, these challenges can be swiftly addressed. First, healthcare practitioners can use the platform to store and share information about patients’ medical histories, health, and treatment results. This data will then be stored in compliance with Power BI’s governance regulations and industry-standard privacy requirements.
This way, health workers can avoid the errors and delays associated with manual data compilation, and easily access real-time patient data to make faster and more efficient decisions, without fear of breaching the ethics of confidentiality.
Additionally, Power BI can be used to make discoveries, detect new patterns and predict health trends before they occur. This potential can then help public health agencies monitor the outbreak of diseases, identify high-risk areas and effectively track vaccination campaigns to prevent their spread.
Meanwhile, another commonly overlooked use case of the tool is its ability to help healthcare organisations manage their several vendors. Power BI can assess the performance of suppliers of medical equipment, internet access, electricity, and food based on predefined parameters to help the organisation make more informed decisions.
The Retail Industry
Fewer industries understand the importance of data more than the retail industry. With Power BI, retailers can strike the right balance between customer satisfaction and profit-making. Data reports help retailers interpret purchasing patterns to identify peculiar customer needs. These insights are then used to personalise each customer experience, making them feel like kings in their own right.
The insights generated from data aggregation can also be used to determine which products to prioritize and stock. This is known as smart inventory management, and it helps retailers ensure they never run out of in-demand products, while also minimising waste by identifying which goods customers shy away from.
Meanwhile, Power BI’s advanced features can be relied upon to analyse a product’s performance against that of a competitor, modify available discounts, perform predictive analysis and cut down on costs by boosting end-to-end flexibility in the supply chain of goods.
The Manufacturing Industry
When it comes to data, the manufacturing industry does not suffer from a dearth. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – manufacturing businesses usually have abundant data. The issue is that the vast majority of this data is often inconsistent and in different formats. As this does not encourage sharing, information exchange and decision-making take significantly longer than they should.
The data visualisation feature of Power BI can help integrate data across different systems to enhance access to reliable information. As a result, manufacturing businesses can identify issues, resolve them instantly and achieve greater control over the production process.
Also, the load of complex data prevalent in the manufacturing industry can frequently be overwhelming, posing a barrier to interpretation and productivity. With Power BI, engaging reports and interactive data visualisations can be generated from large amounts of data, allowing stakeholders to easily interpret data, derive insights and leverage them correctly to identify opportunities, improve processes and optimise business resources.
The Education Industry
Given how delicate the education sector is, the importance of proper data aggregation, analysis and sharing cannot be overemphasised. First, Power BI helps educators identify absent students and implement targeted interventions for them by tracking attendance trends and identifying patterns.
The Power BI dashboard can also be customised to display key performance indicators (KPIs) like exam scores and discipline referrals, among others, to facilitate the early detection of anomalies and address them. Educators, administrators, and other college stakeholders can rely on Power BI to provide real-time insights into academic progress, tuition, student enrolments and course curriculum within a considerably short period of time and at a low cost.
Meanwhile, regulatory bodies can utilise the Power BI capabilities to ensure that educational institutions meet compliance requirements and accreditation standards. All of these use cases are sure to assist key players in the education industry in setting smart goals, measuring progress and adapting to changing environments.
The Finance Industry
The finance industry arguably handles the most raw data among other industries on this list. Every day, new data is being formulated. By using Power BI, different departments of a finance company can efficiently collaborate on a project without compromising on security.
The Quick Insights feature of the platform is also sure to benefit financial analysts as it draws valuable conclusions and inferences, which might not be immediately apparent to the human eye, from datasets inputted by the user.
The Power Query feature, on the other hand, allows financial experts to generate reports, tables and interactive charts by aggregating data from different sources. While the “what if” parameter helps them make accurate predictions and forecasts based on present datasets, the customisable dashboard allows them to track KPIs like working capital, cash flow, gross and net margin, current ratio and revenue growth rate.
Conclusion
Power BI offers several features that endear it to the heart of several industry professionals. Beyond the industries discussed, the platform also benefits users in the insurance, engineering and public sectors, among others. As more industries discover the value of data-driven insights, their future, and modes of operation will be shaped by this invaluable tool. Even better, Power BI integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products, services and third-party software, ensuring a hassle-free onboarding process.
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