In this age of data, almost every organization uses its data to make decisions. Power BI is Microsoft's business analytics tool, and it provides several solutions, including packaged reports and prebuilt dashboards (offered by vendors).
But are prebuilt solutions good enough for your business? Read the blog and dive into it.
Attraction of Prebuilt Dashboards
Most companies provide preset dashboards for easy and rapid initialization into Power BI. These dashboards have many advantages:
Quick Implementation:
Prebuilt desk offers immediate analysis of data, thus, eliminating all the exorbitant setup processes and customizations that may apply.
Cost-Efficient:
They can quite often sound appealing to a small or medium-sized business as they are cost-efficient than custom ones.
Pre-Customized with Metrics:
Generally, pre-configured dashboards also come with some general metric sets, including those which are usually included in industry-standard metrics and KPIs. This serves as the basic minimum for data analysis.
Limitations of Prebuilt Dashboards
It's useful to start from the convenience of the prebuilt dashboards, but it may not address the real need of your business. Some possibilities include:
Lack of Customization:
A prebuilt dashboard is generic; it should not be able to capture the specific requirements of the business. Derive utmost significance from dashboards by imposing almost customization.
Limited Flexibility:
There is little flexibility in these dashboards when it comes to changing them to fit your unique business processes or data sources. As your business is evolving, your pre-built solutions are surely going to become less effective sooner or later.
Requires Initial Work:
Even with prebuilt dashboards, some work is required for integrating those dashboards into existing systems and data sources. This may include mapping data, establishing connections, as well as verifying the accuracy of data.
Importance of Exact Requirements
To get best outcomes from Power BI, it is important to know even further requirements. It means understanding your business objectives, identifying relevant key metrics, and figuring out the specific insights you want to gain from your data.
Here are a few steps which can help you get started:
Set out Key Metrics:
Identify what the key performance indicators (KPIs) are for your business-from sales figures to customer satisfaction rates, or measures of operational efficiency.
Identify Data Sources:
Determine which data sources you want to connect to Power BI. This could include your ERP system, CRM, and financial databases, among many others. If you're using Acumatica or exploring other ERP systems, check out our detailed Power BI vs. Acumatica comparison to understand how they stack up for data analysis.
Define User Roles:
Recognize the users who will interact with the dashboards and their specific uses. Some may only need viewing access and others, even more.
Effort Required to Start
The prebuilt dashboards offer a great starting point, but some tweaking is necessary to ensure they fit your business requirements. Here are the steps one should take:
Data Integration:
Ensure that all your source data will be well integrated into Power BI software. This may involve data connections, field mapping, and much more activities related to data integrity.
Customization:
Customize the pre-built dashboards according to your needs. This typically entails adding new metrics, changing the existing ones, or developing your own visualization. To explore how dashboards can transform your business, read Transform Your Business with Advanced Power BI Dashboards.
Training and Support:
Train your teams so they know how to use the dashboards effectively, and ongoing support is even more important to sort out any issues and make changes.
Conclusion
Prebuilt Power BI reports and dashboards are certainly an easy, inexpensive way to get started with your data. However, to really realize the true value of Power BI, you need to understand exactly what you require and do some fine-tuning and integration.
That is how you will be able to develop dashboards that will give you insights to facilitate informed decision-making toward your business goals.
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