How Power BI can make your workday easier

When your company has been in business for a while, then you’ve built up a huge amount of data – probably stored within different systems and files. From your WMS/TMS/FMS, till several Excel sheets and your hour registration system. Wouldn’t it be great if you could access this data all at once? And wouldn’t it be even better if you could transform this data into easy to understand reports and dashboards? Preventing you from spending hours checking different systems and files to find out how your business is doing?

Well, we can assure you this: you’re not the only one. We receive this question on a regular basis from our customers. Forming one of our main drivers to find a ready to use, standard – but still affordable – solution that would fit the needs of logistics service providers. In order to find the best BI tool, we have compared several solutions. But it turns out most of them are expensive, difficult to use and coupled with long implementation projects. Not really the type of solution we were looking for – since we wanted to offer our customers a standard, quick deployable BI tool which could be – preferably – integrated with Microsoft Dynamics.

In 2013, Microsoft introduced the first version of Power BI which has grown into a mature solution. A complete BI tool with the recognizable look & feel of Microsoft Office. And by that recognition, for many users easy to use.

While identifying the specific needs of our customer in order to be able to use a BI tool, we noticed that our customers encountered a number of problems to gain better insight into their data – mainly caused by a lack of knowledge of the data and architecture needed to create reports. For example, where is data stored? How do you select the right data sets and what would be the right architecture? How can you report on large amounts of data? But also – more in depth – how do you determine the turnover rate of a pallet? And where do you start, and to what do you compare?

In order to be able to answer these questions, the expertise of a consultant was consulted. Which is a fairly straightforward – but inefficient process. That is why we said let’s change this process and start providing standard data sets that can be used for reporting. To make sure we addressed the right KPIs, we launched a survey among our customers to indicate the most important KPIs for logistics services providers. Based on this input, we have created pre-defined data sets that allow our customers to be up and running with Power BI without a fuzz, and stay in control of your KPIs.

At Boltrics, we have developed Power BI in the same way as our other products. So as a standard branch product, based on the input of our customers. This also means that we ensure that the data sets get updated with each functional update and the all new ones we add, are added in a generic way so all customers can make use of the newest data sets.

At the same time, it is possible to add data to the predefined data sets and create new dashboards – based on Dynamics NAV or other sources – yourself.

Curious what Power BI could mean for your organization. Register for our on demand webinar: