User Review
( votes)Your CRM isn’t just a central hub to manage your customer and prospect relationships. It is loaded with rich data that if analyzed can help you maximize your sales potential and efficiency. There are also additional data sources outside your CRM to extract and synthesize to provide you the full picture — the essential insights you need to make informed decisions. This is where a Business Intelligence (BI) solution like Microsoft Power BI steps in. Power BI, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and standalone applications; it is also considered a leader among BI solutions by tech analysts Gartner and Forrester.
Making decisions about your customer relationships shouldn’t be based solely on a gut feeling. When integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Microsoft Power BI, not only can you bridge the benefits of deeper insight into your customer relationships, products, and processes, but you also expand the information shared across your organization’s teams to ensure your strategies are always backed by intelligence.
Power BI provides interactive visualizations and business intelligence via a simple user interface that makes it so anyone can create their own dashboards and reports. Getting your organization trained and up and running is easy. First, you can download Power BI Desktop for free to start building reports. To get the full benefit of the solution, user licenses are recommended, which are quite affordable.
The Business Intelligence and Visualization Capabilities of Power BI Visuals
Power BI offers many visuals out-of-the-box, with many more available from Microsoft and Microsoft Partners in the Microsoft AppSource. There are also options to create custom Power BI visuals that can even be published and shared with the Microsoft community.
Creating a visualization is easy with user features like drag-and-drop, color, shadowing, and other graphical options. A large canvas offers ample space to build your visualizations.
Data Integration – Excel and Power Query
You will need to de-silo your disparate, unrelated sources of data to transform them into coherent, visually immersive insights.
Power Query allows you to connect many different data sources to create reports, insights, and data visualizations like charts or graphs. All your sources of data from an Excel spreadsheet, a cloud-based or on-premises hybrid data warehouse can all be synthesized. On the note of Excel since it is so commonly used already to convert tables to visualizations: as you may have guessed, Excel works seamlessly with Power BI. You can connect Excel queries, reports, and data models to Power BI dashboards to broaden your data analytics and visualizations.
Filter Tools
Multiple filtering tools such as cross-filtering, drill-through, and drill-down and drill-up are available. Cross-filtering gives you more control over applying filters when working with related tables by allowing you to apply filters to one or both sides of a table relationship. Drill-through allows you to create a page in your report focusing on a specific entity. Drill through will take you to the focused page for details filtered to that context. To explore in-depth details about your data, you can drill-down or drill-up. When a hierarchy is in place on a visual, drill-down will provide additional details on a specific data point. When hovering over a visual, you will see drill up or down options if a hierarchy is in place.
Real-time Analytics
Power BI can help you make timely decisions based on live data with data streaming and updates to your dashboards in real-time using time-sensitive data collectors.
Built-in AI
Power BI provides several pre-trained machine learning models so that when looking for trends in your data, AI Insights in Power BI may help you discover more.
Performance Analyzer
Performance Analyzer measures the performance of report elements such as DAX formulas or visuals and displays what is most and least resource-intensive, allowing you to make changes as you need, such as getting a report to generate faster.
Global Accessibility
Power BI is available in 43 languages, and accessible worldwide with 40 primary and backup datacenters. You can choose the data center closest to you to optimize performance. Power BI has the largest global footprint compared to its competitors.
Integrated Power Apps
Combining all the Power Platform apps; Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents enhances your experience and amplifies the total power potential of the platform to empower your workforce.
Read the full blog here.
Get Started with JourneyTEAM
JourneyTEAM was recently awarded Microsoft US Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communications) and the Microsoft Eagle Crystal trophy as a top 5 partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central software implementations. Let JourneyTEAM show you how to put your data to its best use with Power BI. We can provide demos and full custom introductions. Contact JourneyTEAM today!
Article by: Dave Bollard – Marketing Director | 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security, and more. www.journeyteam.com
