Business Intelligence

Power BI is a cloud-based BI service that was released by Microsoft in 2014. It leverages years of experience in MS Excel, SQL Server, Access and continually, and for good reason, is indicated as a top#1 BI solution in numerous market reports.

One of the most important advantages of Power BI is that it is able to pull data from almost any source – not just a selected data ecosystem or technology. In addition, it is relatively easy to use from the user side of reports and allows them to be shaped quite freely for the business or operational needs of the organization.

It also allows you to share selected reports or sections of reports with other users, so your entire organization can be data-driven without compromising the security of your data.

And last but not least, it is highly cost-effective – both in terms of implementation and subsequent maintenance.

Our team has an information security policy with appropriate IT monitoring, and our teams are well-equipped to use technology and tools for sensitive information.

In addition, with our services we improve the security of your organization’s data and information by reducing the number of files or emails sent electronically to a total minimum using secure technology equipped with multi-step authentication.

All data captured in Power BI is encrypted by default using Microsoft-managed keys. Customer data stored in Azure SQL databases is fully encrypted using Azure SQL Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) . Customer data stored in Azure BLOB Storage is encrypted using Azure Storage Encryption. The Power BI Premium license additionally allows you to use custom keys to encrypt stored data that is imported into the data store.

That’s what many managers think until they see in practice how useful, fast and accessible their reports can be using business intelligence technology.

This is due to the great ease with which they can get the information they need at any given time, at any level of detail – often with just a few mouse clicks or finger taps on a smartphone screen.

However, BI isn’t just about the front-end, it’s also about everything that goes on in the background – which means automating the collection, combination and processing of data. Consider how much time you and your team will save in creating analytical reports, summaries and analyzing them by paying off your technology debt in the reporting & analytics area.

The Power BI solution is highly cost-effective. The cost of maintaining the solution itself depends mainly on the number of users of the target reports. The cost of a license for 1 user is $10-20/month (depending on the level of complexity of the reporting back-end).

On top of that, of course, there is the one-time cost of implementation, i.e. the overall design of the report architecture, data model and user interface. However, the development work and thus the cost can be spread over time. This part of the cost is a function of the company’s reporting and analytical needs, the level of complexity of the business model and data structures. However, thanks to the flexibility of the technology behind Power BI and affordable integrability with external systems and databases, the implementation costs are not comparable to the deployment of complex systems such as ERP, xP&A or EPM/CPM.

You don’t need to increase employment. Who knows, you may even find that you can optimize your current resources. A correct BI implementation is most often combined with the automation of a significant part of analytical and reporting processes. This way your team won’t have to waste time unproductively transferring data from one spreadsheet to another.

We often enter into a partnership with our clients after a period of fundamental implementation, helping them gradually develop and optimize their reports, respond to new analytical and managerial needs, provide continuous QA and optimize further processes.

Exploiting our extensive experience in finance and strategy, we also provide synergistic consulting services, including ongoing financial controlling. You then have your comprehensive analytical needs provided under one roof.

Not necessarily. It all depends, of course, on individual needs and where the data is currently being processed. Data from sources (e.g., your accounting system, ERP, CRM, workflow applications, spreadsheets) can feed the BI reporting ecosystem directly, without going through a big data warehouse. If you decide you need one, however, or if it would simply be more efficient for whatever reason, you can start by using so-called Datamarts, which are relatively low-cost data storages, based on the Azure SQL cloud.

Of course, we can help you on both simplified data flow and slightly more complex data warehousing solutions. However, this does not mean an exponential increase in the cost of deployment – today, these are effective solutions whose cost of maintenance increases as the volume of data increases.