Power BIFor Customer insights Big data

for your small businessIf you are the owner of a small or mid-sized business, you look for any edge you can. This means spending your limited budget wisely. How can you make the best decisions to move your business forward?

Collecting and analyzing business intelligence

(BI) can help you steer your business in a positive

direction. Are you challenged by product losses,

or dealing with business cycles that are difficult

to track? Do you know what makes your business

succeed and how much it costs to run?

If you don’t know, you need business intelligence.

Businesses, both large and small, use business

intelligence for more than the traditional sales

and marketing analysis. Some businesses use BI

to track employee production, since that’s a key

factor for their bottom line. Others use it to track

their sales and inventory to understand where they

might improve day-to-day business practices.

One of the top trends in business today is self-serve

business intelligence. This has great advantage for small

businesses, who can’t afford to hire full-time IT experts

or data consultants. A recent article from Aberdeen

discovered that without self-serve BI, small businesses

spend 68% more per user on internal support1,

compared to those that employ a self-service model.

Power BI from Microsoft offers a full set of BI tools using

the familar Excel interface.

1A Simple Cost Justification for Self-Service Analytics, Aberdeen Group, Feb. 1, 2013. Must register for content

How business intelligencecan help your business

The Power BI ToolboxPower BI gives small businesses the business intelligence tools once reserved for larger enterprises. Even if you’re not an IT or data expert, you can combine, visualize and analyze data to help grow your business.

Power Query—Discover dataDiscover and connect to data from public and corporate data sources with Power BI in Excel. This do-it-yourself tool includes new data search abilities.

Power Query—Clean, merge and transform your dataUse Power Query in Power BI to get your data ‘analysis ready.’ Create queries that you can save and use again later to refresh your data. Merge different tables in one step; rename, delete or even create fields.

Power Pivot—Create a data model Create a data model in Power Pivot from a variety of data sources and refresh it as often as you want. Format and filter your data, create calculated fields, define KPIs to use in PivotTables and share your reports with your team.

Power View— interactive data explorationWith Power View you can create stunning visualizations from tables and matrices to pie, bar, and bubble charts and sets of multiple charts.

Power Map—Explore geospatial data Power Map for Excel is a three-dimensional data visualization tool for Excel 2013 that provides new and powerful ways to look at information. Eye-opening maps show changes over time, and are easy to share with your team or customers.

2Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information”, Science, 332(6025), 2011: 60–65

2. Interview with Brad Thompson, Blue Margin,12/2014

“Decision makers need insights, they need to learn things from the data that can help them improve their business.”

The world’s capacity to store data was reported as 295 exabytes in 2007. That’s equivalent to 61 CDs for every person in the world in 2007. This would make a stack from the earth to the moon and a quarter of the distance beyond. 2

But people can only understand a single page of data at a time and make a decision. Even a few hundred rows of data is too big for a human to look at and quickly understand.

Making sense of even a fraction of the data available means you need a powerful tool.

The good news? BI has gotten easier to use and more accessible. It can empower individuals to make quick and insightful decisions, even if they’re not trained data analysts.

“The world is producing big data, but humans need small data,” according to Rob Collie, Power Pivot expert and instructor.

With a BI tool, you can pull data from inventory, point of sales systems, a website, and Excel spreadsheets. You can discover and gather data from public databases. By combining and filtering this data, you can get a clear picture of how your business is doing.

Ask questions Experiment Simplify• How many loyal customers do you

have?• Do you know the Lifetime Value of a customer?• How do customers find your website?

Even after you have a dashboard,

keep experimenting to discover insights that will help you make decisions about your business.

65% of IT initiatives fall on their faces

because they become ‘feature monsters.’ 2

Three tips for business intelligence

Even better news? Power BI now costs less, so you can get business insights without breaking your budget. You can even get a free preview to try it out before you buy. Learn more.

Before you dive into dashboards and data models, prepare by asking yourself these questions

Whether you’re an experienced Excel user, or just starting to explore business intelligence (BI), creating a business intelligence roadmap will help you discover key business insights. Just like a business roadmap, your BI roadmap will tell you how to proceed.

Determine the end goal of your business. What do you want to learn about your business? Do you want to control inventory, track business development or determine the best way to market your business? Have a plan, and keep it simple to start.

You now have more choices than ever before for finding and using data. Your internal data may be in silos throughout the company. Or you may need outside data that will help you see larger industry or consumer trends. Look for a BI tool that makes it easy to integrate and find data sources within the tool.

Even in a small business, it can take more than one person to gather data, determine the right questions to ask, and review the results. Decide who in your company can help. You may need to hire a data analyst to set up your initial dashboards.

Do you have a BI roadmap? What are your goals? Where will you find the data you need?

Do you have the right partners?

Power Pivot—the brains of Power BIPower Pivot provides powerful analytical modeling. Data is processed in-memory, allowing you to work quickly with data volumes in excess of 100 million rows, in split second times. Unlike the usual moderate upgrades to software you’ve come to expect, Power Pivot increases Excel’s capabilities by a lot.

Rob Collie, Power Pivot expert and instructor at PowerPivotPro, says “Imagine the year is 1910, and you are one of the world’s first biplane pilots. One day at the airfield, someone magically gives you a 2012 jet plane. You climb inside and discover that the controls have been designed to mimic the controls of your 1910 biplane. You receive a dramatic upgrade to your aircraft without having to relearn how to fly from scratch. That’s the kind of upgrade that Power Pivot provides to Excel pros.”

How hard is it to learn? How powerful is it? Is it like a Pivot Table?

“The best approach to learning Power Pivot is to start simple and grow. It’s not like you need to use calculus. I don’t use any math that is more complex than what my ten-year old already knows,” says Rob.

“Excel caps out at one million rows of data per sheet. Power Pivot goes well beyond that, in excess of 100 million rows. For most people, you will find it actually HAS no practical limit,” says Rob.

“Power Pivot adds a lot of power to Excel, but it doesn’t force Excel pros to learn a million new things. It’s still Pivot Tables. It’s still Excel formulas. It just adds a number of new capabilities that Excel pros will never put down once they have tried them,” explains Rob.

This small business owner was losing almost $5,000 a month on inventory, and he didn’t know where the problem was. Fortunately he got help to analyze his sales and inventory data to find out what was happening.

Tracking inventory and salesThe bar owner and his friend, Microsoft senior product manager Michael Tejedor, connected the bar’s Point of Sale database and combined that with the bar’s inventory levels.

The business owner tracked his inventory by hiring a vendor to come in once a week. The vendor brought in different scales and measured each of the bottles of alcohol. Depending on the weight of the bottle, and the viscosity of the liquid, they could figure out how many ounces remain in the bottles. They recorded those inventory levels in an Excel spreadsheet.

They connected directly to the bar’s Point of Sale database and three inventory spreadsheets using Power Query. Power Query allowed them to combine those files, and then cleanup the files to eliminate redundancy.

The next step was to use Power Pivot’s modeling tool to join the inventory data with the Point of Sale data. That allowed them to build a visual report to get a picture of where the losses were occurring.

Clear insightsIt was clear from the visualization that the majority of losses were from vodka. They were also able to see that the majority of the losses came from only six bottles.

With this knowledge, the business owner changed his business practices. Instead of weighing everything weekly, he purchased scales and weighed the six types of liquor daily. Tracking all the inventory daily would have been a costly project.

Data analysis showed exactly where the loss was coming from.

Behavior changesThe bar owner wanted to take it further, and use data visualization to change behavior. He created a contest to to encourage bartenders to serve the ‘perfect pour’ of 1.5 ounces. The team created a chart to track how much each bartender poured over time, using Power BI.

ResultsThe result for the business? The employees got a visual, real-time example of how well they were doing, so they could understand what they had to do to improve. And the bar owner saved a lot of money.

See the visualization that helped the bar owner find his business loss in this video. Watch an updated video to see the newest features of Power BI.

How BI helped a small businesssave $5,000 a monthA Seattle bar owner found out firsthand how business intelligence could transform his business.

For further reading

If you own an earlier version of Office, or are thinking about using

Power BI online with Office 365, download a free trial version of

Office 365 and the Power BI trial.

Try Office 365

Try all the features and capabilities of Power BI! Download a free trial

here. You’ll need to have Office 2013 Pro Plus to use this.

Try Power BI

Already own Office 2010 or Office 2013? You can download

and enable Power Pivot and Power Query.

Download Power Pivot

You’ll get better results with 64-bit Office, but you can try it out

using 32-bit. What’s your version of Office? Find out here.

Which version of Office?

Power BI for Office 365

Faster insights to data with Power BI Jumpstart

Get started with Power Pivot in Microsoft Excel 2013

Tutorial PivotTable data analysis using a Data Model in Excel 2013

Download Power Pivot sample data and resources

Microsoft Power Query for Excel

Read about the latest features on the blog.

Download the preview