Microsoft’s Power BI: manufacturers cash in on their data
As we know, one of the biggest ways manufacturers can continue to innovate and stay ahead is through their data. An IDC survey, commissioned by Microsoft, showed that the manufacturing industry has the most to gain—a whopping $371 billion— from big data’s potential.
Achieving this potential net value—what Microsoft calls the “data dividend”—requires manufacturers to become data smart and perform some combination of the following four things.
1) Bring together even as few as 3-4 discrete data sources
2) Use modern analytics tools to glean insights from data
3) Surface those insights in a consumable fashion to the right decision-makers across the company
4) Ensure that insights from data are shared in a timely manner
We’re excited to share a new tool that just made this easier with the release of the new and improved Power BI Preview.
A path to profitability and productivity
If you’re not familiar with Power BI, it’s a cloud-based business analytics service (software-as-a-service) for non-technical business users. With just a browser or a Power BI mobile app, manufacturers can keep a pulse on their business via live operational dashboards. You can deeply explore business data, through interactive visual reports, and enrich it with additional data sources.
Microsoft launched the first version of Power BI last February and since then businesses have used it to gain powerful insights, helping them become more productive and competitive. The new business analytics experience now makes it easier for users to sign up, connect to and use your company’s data.
In less than 5 minutes, you can create personalized dashboards and reports on your data, bringing data from multiple sources—Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and more—into one spot so you can monitor it. Through a new Power BI Designer tool, the reports you create are impactful with state-of-the-art interactive charts, maps, graphs, and data transformation.
Everything is touch-optimized so you can find answers to your questions using drag and drop gestures and natural language. And it’s all designed for on the go, so you can make decisions based on the right data anytime, anywhere, on any device. You can take a tour of its capabilities here.
Real growth and efficiency gains
A number of manufacturers have gotten an early start on implementing data-smart strategies that use Power BI and are already experiencing real growth and efficiency gains.
For example, when Trek Bicycle added Power BI to their systems, they saw an opportunity to transform the way employees resolve their technology needs via their Helpdesk. Power BI has given them insights they never had before through the new dashboard feature, enabling them to be more productive, better allocate time and resources, and eliminate 12-15 hours a month in redundancy.”
When the ABB Italy subsidiary of manufacturer ABB adopted Power BI, it improved efficiencies, slashing the time to generate reports by as much as a month, so it can conduct faster, fuller analyses, and also creates highly visual reports that enable deeper insights.
And when global textile and materials manufacturer Albany International combined new Microsoft BI technologies with existing data sources, it exposed their SAP data in new and valuable ways, giving simple, real-time, role-based visibility of complex manufacturing metrics to business users—product and sales managers, analysts, even the CEO—to make faster, more informed decisions and create new strategies to boost profitability.
I think Albany’s VP of IT Barry Duncan said it best: “when the CEO is using our BI solution himself to find new business trends, then that is a very powerful tool.”
By bringing together big data insights, predictive analytics and powerful visualizations, manufacturers can realize significant data dividend gains in employee productivity, operational improvements, better customer engagement and product innovation.
To learn more, you can watch this video and visit powerbi.com to start cashing in on your data.
Twitter at @MSFTmfg
LinkedIn: Sanjay Ravi
Twitter: @sanrav
