EBITA Systems

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Sales and Manufacturing Operations constantly face challenge to present “one story”, both in “Daily Sales and Operations Meeting” and in “Weekly Senior Leadership Team Reporting”. Each department would use their own hand-made Excel spreadsheets in native format or published on SharePoint when talking about past period achievement, current status, and future prospect. Lack of consistency leads to confusion and question about information integrity and business direction.

After a careful analysis, several issues have been identified:
•    Some critical information has not been tracked in the main system NAV; instead, it is often kept offline.
 
•    There is lack of solid process for coordination to achieve smooth order fulfillment. Stakeholders are either not aware of or not actually accountable for actions required, like “Shipment Date” and various hold-ups. This leads to lack of integrity with business-critical data.
 
•    There is lack of common standard about how data in system is retrieved and interpreted – leading to inconsistency.
 
•    Staff spent hours daily just to compile requested information chart using data from multiple sources, including system data exports and manually maintained spreadsheets – leading to loss of productivity and human errors.

POWER BI

Power BI is an “analysis tool”, meant for "Business Intelligence" and "Data Visualization", with quick turnaround. It offers more than 24 visualization widgets. Power BI enable organizations to query data to gain valuable insights, creating an opportunity for decisions to be made in a timely and effective manner.

Power BI is self-service business intelligence. For most purposes non-technical users will be able to crunch the numbers. Switching to different graphics and displays is easy.

Power BI is integrated with collaboration tools like SharePoint and benefits from the connectivity of the cloud. “Content Pack” can be created and automatically refreshed and accessible by specific groups, and “mobile-friendly”. Power BI uses standard SQL tool and syntax. Power BI can work together with Cubes and SSRS. Power BI can manage table Relationship.

SOLUTIONS

Once the fundamental issues are identified, Sales & Operations team worked with Information System services on the architecture and tools to help implement the improved “business processes” and “workflows”, as well as “Dashboard Views” for quick and easy insight into business activities.

While NAV Reporting Objects would remain the main report-writing tools for clear reasons and JetReports could be the complimentary report-writing tool for structured custom financial reporting package, Power BI steps up for "Business Intelligence" and "Data Visualization", clearly a good fit for the team’s challenge to present “one story” in dashboard style.

The team has implemented a data model that integrated all the “facets” of aspects of interest. Several queries have been created to facilitate dynamic views for presentation. Reports have been designed in Power BI Designer and published to PowerBI.com so users could access Dashboard on the Web. Schedule has been set up to automatically refresh data from live database. Mobile clients have been set up on iPhones and Android phones for users to access the mobile version of the Dashboard.

The result has created a "WOW" among the line managers and test users. Without worrying about 20 hours per week wasted on manual report preparation from many angles of views and struggling with different versions of the same underlying story, it is clear that finally it is time to take a break and get back to the normal value-added core business activities.