When you do your homework, Microsoft BI can be a real reporting asset.
Rating: 7 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
It's being used in the Marketing Communications department to help support the marketing campaign efforts of our MarCom staff across our division. The BI was implemented so we could have real time return on investment reporting to analyze how successful campaign efforts had been and use that data to help shape the financial decisions for the remainder of the campaign and also fiscal year. It also helped in data and customer mining to help design campaigns around products that were being replaced with new updates to mine our own data and run successful campaigns targeted specifically to those individuals and companies.
As a result of our efforts though it helped inspire other divisions to implement their own versions of BI for their own reporting and data mining purposes.
As a result of our efforts though it helped inspire other divisions to implement their own versions of BI for their own reporting and data mining purposes.
Pros
- Real Time Reporting - Very useful when all of the connections are made correctly and you are able to simply build a report that will help you achieve your results and present them in a professional manner.
- Customized reporting - The ability to write your own complex equations to input into your reporting is amazing, it allows true customized reporting for your company and individuals.
- Expanding your data mining - When you work through all of the importing connections correctly you can data mine so much valuable information for your business and campaigns.
Cons
- Style - Presentations are everything in the business world these days and I feel a huge improvement would be to make the charts and reporting sleeker.
- Connectivity - as with all complex reporting systems if there is even one connection that isn't correct it can throw all of your reporting off which can be frustrating.
- Usability - The reporting for someone who knows it is awesome, but for someone who has no idea what they're doing it's a little bit hard for them to know how to make simple changes which can put more work on the Analyst.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it is really well suited in a company that completely understands where the information will be coming from. If they understand all of the connections from the inputting information it will help with the overall implementation and execution of the project. So it's worth doing the due diligence yourselves or hiring a company that specializes in the implementation of BI to help understand all of the incoming data and how it connects to itself. If you do your homework the implementation will be successful for any company but if the time is not put in to identifying and understanding where all of the information is coming from it will not be as successful.
Vetted Review
4 years of experience