What's Hot with Power BI?

Discover what our Microsoft Power BI Experts have been working on. When we're not helping you excel, we're finding ways to share our latest research to help business owners like yourself excel. Try our business intelligence templates and see how you can create a Power BI dashboard of your own!

Ezequiel Ferrario Ezequiel Ferrario

Unlock The Value of Profit Density

Enhancing your warehouse operations doesn't have to be complicated. By adding a real-time heat map to your management dashboard, you can increase visibility, improve efficiency, and boost profitability. This tool enables you to make well-informed decisions quickly, ensuring you make the most of your resources.

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Ezequiel Ferrario Ezequiel Ferrario

Inventory Turnover, Simplified

In inventory management, the Inventory Turnover Ratio (ITR) is a critical and telling metric.

This indicator not only assesses how well a business manages its inventory but also offers insight into its operational vitality. Essentially, the ITR indicates how frequently inventory is sold and restocked over a set timeframe.

Keeping the Inventory Turnover Ratio at a healthy level is vital for maintaining the right balance between supply and demand.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

Optimizing Inventory Management with AI

In optimizing inventory management, businesses can leverage AI to achieve significant advantages through advanced analytics and workflows.

Key areas where AI can enhance operations include: demand forecasting, warehouse automation, and predictive shipping, which collectively facilitate better customer service and supply chain management.

Demand forecasting, particularly, poses a considerable challenge for inventory-centric businesses; however, AI provides a solution by analyzing large datasets, recognizing complex patterns, and delivering real-time insights, thereby improving accuracy and customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs and risks associated with inventory management.

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Micah Faas Micah Faas

The 10 Dashboard Design Commandments

The "Dashboard Commandments" serve as a fundamental set of guidelines that ensure our data visualization tools are both effective and user-friendly.

By adhering to principles such as clear storytelling, high-quality aesthetics, and avoidance of common pitfalls, we can create dashboards that deliver actionable insights swiftly, support informed decision-making, and foster user engagement.

By evaluating dashboards against these commandments, we can highlight areas of strength and pinpoint opportunities for enhancement, ensuring continuous improvement in our data visualization efforts.

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Micah Faas Micah Faas

Why Data Preparedness is Essential for AI Readiness

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, Artificial Intelligence is poised to reshape our businesses and society for generations to come.

For Business owners and officers who are committed to running data-driven operations, the natural question is ‘how can my business benefit from AI?’

We’ll dedicate future blogs to the incremental path that a business can take in the adoption of AI but here we’ll focus on the data preparation required to get the most out of AI.

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Ezequiel Ferrario Ezequiel Ferrario

Guided Navigation in Power BI

Dashboards that tell good stories are premium dashboards.

One of the challenges in dashboard story-telling is that even with the best told stories, it is possible to lose the story sequence or that the emphasis is placed in the wrong place and the story is not conveyed to the people who rely on the dashboard to make sound business decisions.

This is where Guided Navigation in Power BI offers a method for surfacing the stories that your dashboards are intended to tell.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

How BI Can Inform Your ERP Selection Process (Manufacturing)

For businesses that derive their revenue from Manufacturing or Distribution, the choice for ERP includes MS Dynamics 365 Biz Central, SAP Biz One Pro, SYSPRO, Netsuite, Acumatica.

The cost of an ERP is high and the deployment cost even higher, especially when the project takes circuitous routes.

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Craig Juta Craig Juta

10 Imposters of Business Intelligence

One of the observations that I’ve made is that many businesses have settled for Imposters of BI — Reports, Overviews, Forms, Charts, etc  — rather than BI itself.

As you read the list of imposters below you could argue with perfect utility that any of these imposters of BI can make a huge contribution to BI. This is true, but on their own they are not BI and making the mistake of labelling them as such immediately reduces the Vision that your business has for BI.

I hope this blog helps you distinguish between imposters and the real thing so that your investment into BI becomes a unified, recognized asset rather than a fragmented set of data renders.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

Driving Innovation in Organic Food Manufacturing - Becoming Data Driven with FreshBI

A pioneering organic food producer, renowned for their high-quality and innovative products, partnered with FreshBI to tackle a critical challenge: the absence of a systematic approach to track and analyze the performance of their innovative items and product groupings. To address this, FreshBI integrated a SharePoint list with the company's product data, creating a robust and dynamic Power BI dashboard that offers real-time insights and a customizable analysis table.

This strategic collaboration not only saved time and resources but also empowered product managers and finance leaders with the intelligence to make informed decisions, align cross-functional teams more efficiently, and ultimately steer the company towards enhanced profitability and a strong market position. This case is a testament to the company’s dedication to data-driven strategies and sustainable innovation.

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Micah Faas Micah Faas

Color Theory in Dashboard Design

Welcome to our exploration of color theory in dashboard design, merging the art and science of color to craft visually engaging and effective data experiences. Color theory is pivotal in understanding the synergy of colors and their psychological impact, guiding the selection of a harmonious palette that not only pleases the eye but also conveys the desired message. It’s vital in dashboard design, enhancing visual hierarchy, accentuating key data, and improving readability.

The process involves considering the audience, the industry, and the company's personality to ensure a consistent and resonant color scheme. Recognizing the emotional resonance of colors—like the energy of red, the tranquility of blue, or the elegance of black—is crucial. The selection of a color palette, whether monochromatic, analogous, complementary, triadic, or tetradic, significantly affects user engagement and comprehension. This understanding is essential in crafting BI dashboards that are not just aesthetically pleasing but also intuitive and insightful, empowering users to make informed decisions.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

Empowering Data-Driven Decision Making: COFI's Strategic Partnership with FreshBI

The Council of Forest Industries (COFI) represents key producers in BC's lumber, pulp, paper, and manufactured wood sectors, advocating for a sustainable forest industry. COFI required a more efficient data delivery system for their clients needing timely forest product data, so they partnered with FreshBI, who employed Power BI and Python to automate data retrieval from Canadian lumber statistics, integrate it into COFI's SQL database, and create dynamic, interactive dashboards for real-time analysis.

This strategic collaboration significantly reduced manual labor, optimized data accessibility, and enabled COFI's clients to make well-informed decisions, marking a notable advancement in COFI's service delivery and client empowerment.

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Ezequiel Ferrario Ezequiel Ferrario

Creating a Waterfall Chart with SVG code in Power BI

A waterfall chart in Power BI is an excellent way to visualize appreciation or depreciation in a value as quantities are added or subtracted from it.

Beyond the traditional use of a waterfall, we can further enhance its utility by integrating it into other visual elements. For instance, it could be incorporated within the structure provided by a matrix holding a financial statement to present the information in a more visually engaging manner. This integration would be achieved through implementing SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics).

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

4 Commandments of Project Management

Since Adam there have been 4 commandments of project management. Project Managers who can answer these questions on demand will succeed. Project Managers who cannot answer these questions on demand will fail.

In the modern world of business, Project Managers making data-driven decisions will boast successful, profitable, and high-cash projects.

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Michael Boisvert Michael Boisvert

Get Deeper Insights: Prompt AI directly from your Power BI Interactions

If your company uses Power BI and you’d like to dial up your ROI on Business Intelligence with an injection of Artificial Intelligence, then this article is for you. With our Power BI custom visual, you can communicate with ChatGPT right from your dashboard and gain deeper insights instantly. This article shows you how.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

Elevating Casino Business Intelligence: A Fresh Perspective

As a business intelligence consultant and Microsoft Silver Partner, FreshBI specializes in the unique field of casino business intelligence. Our expertise lies in transforming complex casino data into actionable insights, tailoring our approach to meet the specific needs of the industry. Through our innovative solutions, we enable casinos to make informed decisions, enhancing their operations and competitiveness. Our journey in this niche sector has been both challenging and fulfilling, as we continuously strive to deliver excellence and value to our clients.

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Michel Burnett Michel Burnett

Cash Flow Sensitivity and Scenarios

In a world of increasing opportunities to obtain and visualize data, it’s important to understand why business intelligence (BI) projects can fail in certain situations – especially when organizations have invested a great deal into resources.

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Craig Juta Craig Juta

It’s OK to Micro-Manage Your Cash Flow

In the complex world of cash flow, accurately predicting your bank balance hinges on analyzing various key elements. This includes tracking cash on hand, sales forecasts, and understanding outflows like operational expenses. Crucially, recognizing the delay between making a sale and receiving the cash, and assessing investments in inventory and marketing, are vital. By effectively correlating these factors, we demystify cash flow prediction, turning it into a strategic tool for improving financial health.

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Madeline Henderson Madeline Henderson

The FreshBI Edge: Powering Tomorrow's Business Intelligence Solutions

At FreshBI, we are pioneering the integration of AI with our BI tools, offering real-time analytics for prompt, informed decision-making and collaborative BI tools to bridge data gaps between departments. Our custom business processing dashboards and tailored Power BI Apps for Salesforce transform raw data into actionable insights, enhancing operational efficiency across various industries. We provide continuous support and training, ensuring our clients fully leverage our innovative BI solutions for their business growth and data-driven decision-making.

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Colin Frank Colin Frank

The Objective Vein: Visualizing the Current of Cash Flow

Understanding cash flow in business is like tracing a river's current. It's not just about numbers; it's visualizing patterns and asking 'what if'. Tools like Power BI transform raw data into dynamic dashboards that forecast and guide decision-making. Beyond mere data, it's about making informed, innovative plans. FreshBI helps businesses navigate this transformative journey, anchoring decisions in clarity and data-driven insight.

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Tomislav Raić Tomislav Raić

Data Alchemy: Turning Manual Analysis into Automated Gold

In the swiftly evolving landscape of data-driven insights, leveraging the full potential of automation in Power BI development stands paramount. The sophisticated tools offered by Microsoft's Power BI enable not only intricate data visualization but also foster expedient and precise report creation, revolutionizing the developmental journey. Integrating Power Automate further escalates the efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, ensuring consistent uniformity in reports, and minimizing errors that are otherwise commonplace in manual processes. Moreover, it facilitates dynamic data refreshes and personalized notifications, keeping you abreast of critical data changes instantaneously. As we delve deeper, we shall unravel transformative Power Automate examples that promise to augment your Power BI experience, steering you towards a future of more effective and adaptable decision-making in the business intelligence realm.

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