Collecting and analyzing your business data is essential in understanding how your business is performing. Once your business has reviewed the data, trends will start to appear which will help uncover what your company is doing well and what needs improvement. This is especially helpful when it comes to making the right decision for your business. You can then develop a strategy to respond to these trends to make sure that you are on track with your business goals. As an example, tracking your company’s sales data can help reveal trends in your business’s performance that aren’t necessarily obvious from day-to-day performance figures.
If you’re not sure about the performance of employees or operational efforts, how will you know if your money & time are being put to good use?
Utilize technology to help you uncover what is performing well & what is not
It can be easy to get lost in all the data you have if you don’t have the right tools to help you understand it. A business intelligence (BI) solution tool can help support you when it comes to understanding and tracking data. In the past, IT professionals had been the primary users of BI applications however, this technology has evolved to become more user-friendly, enabling many users across a variety of industries and skillsets to use the tools.
BI Solution tools feature dashboards, visualizations and reports that can provide you with insight as to how your company, marketing efforts, customer service, shipping, or other parts of your company are doing on a deeper level.
Use Microsoft Power BI to visualize your data and share insights
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool that can help you track and identify what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to your business performance.
Microsoft Power BI is a web-based analytics tool that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization with reports. Since its web-based, Microsoft Power BI can be accessed from pretty much anywhere. It is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources into visually interactive illustrations. Power BI enables you to develop actionable insights for a broad range of scenarios. These scenarios can include customer satisfaction and manufacturing timelines or sales performance. The program also offers modeling tools which will save you time and make data prepping easier. The Power BI experience is very familiar to Excel and Office users so using the program is easy to convert to.
The uses of Power BI may differ amongst departments and employee roles within your company. For example, one department may primarily use the Power BI service to view reports and dashboards. Whereas the operations manager might make extensive use of Power BI Desktop to create reports, then publish those reports to the Power BI service, where others view them. Someone in sales, might mainly use their Power BI phone app to monitor progress on sales quotas, and new lead generation goals. Power BI enables your users to produce customized reports to suit your business’s needs. You can publish and share these reports which makes it is easy to collaborate and discuss data with departments within your company.
How we collect data and use it to track our performance
At Yardstick, we use dashboards to reveal our customer service data. These dashboards help measure our Service Delivery teams performance so they can see in real time exactly how they are doing. These dashboards have been especially helpful since we have employees working remotely. The Service Delivery Manager can view each employee’s activity and intervene as needed, saving them time to focus on other things in their role. Our COO uses this data to help operate the company and make smart decisions that align with our business goals. Yardstick also utilizes dashboards to track our sales opportunities and keep us on pace with timelines and profits.
Turn insights into action! Check out the Microsoft website or contact Yardstick for information on how the Microsoft Power BI tool can make a difference in analyzing your business performance.
