What is Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the process of analyzing business data and presenting

it in user-friendly graphical ways such as dashboards, reports, charts, graphs,
etc. These reports help the business owners to drive changes, eliminate
inefficiencies, and adapt to the market changes. There are many business
intelligence (BI) tools that help in building business intelligence reports.
Nearly 50% of companies use BI tools, and many companies are opting to
integrate BI tools into their system. Tools like Microsoft Power BI are used by
over 3000 companies for business intelligence. Let’s discuss more about Power
BI.
What is Power BI
Power BI is the collection of software apps, services, and connectors that turn the
raw data into meaningful, immersive, and interactive insights.
It was developed by Microsoft and is very versatile to use. It can accept input
from Excel sheets, databases, or even cloud storage. You can connect the
data sources, derive insights, and share them with others. Power BI is the most
popular business intelligence tool out there, but why? let’s discuss why is Power
BI in demand and what makes it different from other tools.
Why Power BI?
In today’s world, “data is the new oil”. Organizations need a tool that can help
them understand the large amount of data that they are collecting. Microsoft
Power BI was introduced to fulfill their needs, It is a powerful data visualization
and analysis tool that allows businesses to turn raw data into actionable insights
and reports.
 Power BI helps users who are beginners who do not come from an
analytical or tech background. Still, they can create reports on the Power
BI desktop.
Microsoft Power BI comes with a free or paid version. The free version only
provides Power BI tools like Power BI Desktop and Power Q&A to dashboards.
Whereas, in the Pro version they provide services like live report
sharing, Power View, and more Power BI apps.
Now that we are familiar with Power BI, let’s see how to use Power BI by
installing it on our devices.
Applications of Power BI
1. Visualize Details Easily
Microsoft Power BI provides such tools that will let you visualize key data points
accurately from various sources in a single dashboard. For instance, you can
have a dashboard that displays the different products in your store, allowing you
to track sales, costs, and expenses in one location. This will help managers at the
same time that they keep their employees updated on sales and expenses.
2. Real-Time Performance
You can understand the Real-Time performance of enterprises on a variety of
levels using Microsoft Power BI. For instance, have a dashboard that lists all of
the projects that are active as well as their due dates. On these projects, you
may also keep a close watch on how each individual employee is doing. This is a
fantastic way to tell your team of changes and deadlines, keep them informed of
one other’s duties for certain tasks, and even allow the staff to keep an eye on
their own performance.
3. Sales Analysis
Another common use for business intelligence tools like Power BI is sales
analysis. Multiple dashboards that display charts can be set up to monitor user
activity throughout an online session. Additionally, what product categories do
your clients purchase the most frequently, or which geographical areas generate
the highest revenue for you? You can adjust your business practices based on
this knowledge to better meet the needs of your clients and boost sales.
4. Improving Marketing
These dashboards can show all kinds of data to assist you to enhance your
marketing campaign if you or the rest of your team are working on any kind of
extensive marketing effort. The software can track parameters like the price at
which each product is sold individually and present all of this data so that you
may develop a more successful marketing plan for upcoming campaigns.
5. Create Consistent Reporting Standards
You may gather the data and produce reports using Power BI to give you
consistent reporting. If the data is delivered in a graphical manner each time, it
is less stressful for the managers, and takes less time to find insights from it, and
the organization may find it helpful to predict information. Additionally, it enables
you to carry out targeted marketing initiatives that are guaranteed to be
effective.
6. Controlling Costs
The average cost of each campaign that has been running on your website can
be displayed on a dashboard. This can assist you in determining which
promotions will benefit your clients and your organization. It also assists you in
deciding how much money to spend on anything in the future. You can also
develop dashboards that show how much money is being spent on each specific
campaign this will help to have proper control of the cost of each product which
leads to control of the overall cost of the organization.
7. Product Development
Another typical use for business intelligence software like Power BI is product
development. When it’s time to pull one product off the market and replace it
with a newer and more successful one, This dashboard shows how much money
is being produced for each particular product that can help your organization.
The dataset gives insights into the Sales and Profits of certain products
belonging to different segments in multiple countries over 2013-14. It comprises
the following columns by default:
Step 1: First, navigate to the Data Tab and select the Table Tools options from
the top navigation bar. Select the New Column option from the table tools and
opportunities to create a new custom column.
Step 2: On clicking the New Column option, an input bar will appear where we
will write a simple DAX expression to create our columns.
Step 3: In DAX, we can access a particular column using the following syntax
– tableName[columnName],The following DAX Expression creates a new column
named TotalManufacturingPrice.
TotalManufacuturingPrice = financials[Manufacturing Price]*financials[Units
Sold]

Step 4: Now, using this newly created column, we make

our ProfitPercentage column using the below expression.
ProfitPercentage = (financials[Profit]/financials[TotalManufacuturingPrice])*100
Step 5: Now, Select the Line chart from the Visualization. Drag
the segment and drop to the X-axis, Again drag the ProfitPercent and drop to
the Y-axis that we have created our custom columns, we can use a line chart
which comes out to be like this:

Profit Analysis using Donut Chart in Power BI

Next, we will create another custom column called ProfitType to tell if the profit
is positive, negative, or null. This can be done by using the IF function in the DAX
Expression like this:
ProfitType =
IF(financials[Profit]<0,”Negative”,IF(financials[Profit]>0,”Positive”,”NULL”))
Step 1: From the top navigation bar, select the New Column option from the
table tools and opportunities to create a new custom column.

Step 2: Select the donut chart from the Visualization. From the field, option drag
the ProfitType and drop to the values and details. This newly created column
can be further used to create a donut chart, as shown below:

Analysis of most profitable day using Bar Chart in Power BI

Suppose we also want to analyze which day of the week has the most significant
number of sales or profit; so for this, we can create an additional
column, Weekday, by extracting the day of the week from the Date Column
already provided using the DAX WEEKDAY function like this:
Weekday = WEEKDAY(financials[Date].[Date],2)
Here, the second parameter of the function refers to the return type.
 If return type = 1, week begins on Sunday (1) and ends on Saturday (7).
numbered 1 through 7.
 If Return type = 2, week begins on Monday (1) and ends on Sunday (7).
 If Return type = 3, week begins on Monday (0) and ends on Sunday
(6).numbered 1 through 7.
For the above function return type is 2, i.e the week begins on Monday.
Step 1: On clicking the New Column option, an input bar will appear where we
will write a simple DAX expression to create our columns.

Step 2: Using this custom column, we can plot the following bar chart and
conclude that we get Maximum Profits on Tuesdays (Weekday = 2)