Optimal data visualization using BI

The search starts with efficient reporting

Good reporting will provide a clear and structured data representation, allowing for in-depth analysis. Be careful not to lose yourself in the large amount of data available. It is important to be selective and choose the most interesting data for your business. This choice can be based on different KPIs within your company.

On the basis of the KPIs, targeted measurements can be taken and you know what data is needed for this purpose. In every situation it is important to have sufficient resources and data available to guarantee a correct analysis.

Business Intelligence (BI) to navigate within your data

By definition, stand-alone data has little meaning; it is only when it is connected and allows interpretation that it can be transformed into valuable information. Often data is fragmented and scattered throughout the system, or hidden in different software solutions. This makes data difficult to find and often unavailable.  When you want to leverage data to further optimize your business processes, a Business Intelligence (BI) tool can provide relief.

The first part of the term, ‘business’, represents your business activities. The second part, ‘intelligence’, stands for obtaining accurate and up-to-date information that helps make informed decisions regarding financial, commercial and operational processes. BI solutions start collecting data across software applications (Dynamics 365 Business Central, CRM, websites and shops, etc.). These solutions allow you to start processing the collected data, making connections, interpreting and visualizing it. Based on BI, you can make better strategic and operational decisions based on the predetermined KPIs you set for your business. These can really boost your delivery rate, customer satisfaction, returns, revenue, margin and so on, among other things.

Is BI only for large companies? Certainly not, the range has expanded tremendously in recent years. There are several BI tools that are relatively easy to implement at SMEs. Plus! Every company big or small wants to know how things are going. Many of these applications you can manage and use yourself, without technical knowledge.

Tools to bring the treasure into the light..

Power BI

Interpreting reports is often a time-consuming task. That's why you can turn to a tool like ‘Power BI’ for visualizing complex data and reports. This tool makes your data dynamic and makes connections. Using minimal input, you have real-time reports, visually represented in clear dashboards, in no time.

Companies want a real-time overview of what is going on. You want to be able to see in a snap how your company is performing both financially and operationally. You want to know not only “what” is happening but also “why” it is happening. Suppose sales are 10% lower than budgeted, you obviously want to know why that is. Thanks to Power BI, you can easily click through and find out the causes of your determinations. Then you can proceed to targeted actions, since you have all the necessary information at your fingertips.  You don't have to be a data expert at all to work with Power BI, either. With minimal training, you can start building your own reports and dashboards and share them throughout the organization.

Jet Reports

Often companies lose an enormous amount of time manually copy-pasting or exporting data from an ERP solution into Excel, and then going about editing this data and building reports. When you wish to report based on live data, the manual process is often associated with a high error rate because the data is exported and manipulated outside the system, and this data is often already out of date. Finding out the underlying details of certain figures and evolutions is also often difficult and time-consuming.

Using an external reporting tool such as Jet Reports , you can import data from the ERP and/or CRM directly and process it in your familiar Excel environment. Full integration with your ERP solution ensures that you have live data when formatting your reports in Excel. Jet Reports enables you to easily identify the underlying causes of figures and trends. In addition, you can call on the many out-of-the-box reports that are available by default. It is even possible to easily customize these reports without requiring any programming knowledge. So you can decide which data is relevant to include on the reports in relation to your predefined KPIs.

Would you like more information about these tools? Or would you like to know which tool is the perfect fit for your company?  Our experts will get to the bottom of it.