Big vision. Small steps.
Blog: Professional advantage - BPM blog
As a client success manager, the best part of my job is witnessing the positive change that our projects make to people’s lives. We spend many of our waking hours at work and I strongly believe that improving our lives at work positively impacts our personal lives outside of the office.
The other day I visited a client who has been on a year-long journey of business process improvement. Their project kicked off with the replacement of their ‘old’ ERP system with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which includes both ERP and CRM software. The two systems alone improved the business process immensely and brought many benefits to the organisation. However, when talking to the users the other day, it was clear they considered the biggest achievement to be the introduction of Power BI, their chosen business intelligence tool.
The common feedback I received is that the true value of the enterprise
system is being realised with the power of Power BI (no pun intended).
Every day, I meet with prospects who have invested a lot of
time, money, and resources in implementing new systems, yet they have not realised
the full potential of their investment because they are not leveraging the
information stored in their systems.
Why?
- The project of replacing the ERP system itself
can be quite an overwhelming process. It is a major undertaking and so much
focus and energy is put into making sure everything goes well that implementing
BI on top is not considered urgent, so it gets pushed back.
- Change management – users are intimidated by BI.
They think it’s too technical. They worry they might ‘break’ their ERP or CRM
systems. So, they go back to exporting and manipulating data from their systems
into Excel; ‘the comfort zone’.
For my client, Power BI has been the ‘a-ha’ moment; it has
multiplied the value of the underlying transactional systems. The ERP, CRM,
Payroll, and other systems have streamlined processes, improved the quality of
data, etc., but the greatest impact was achieved by layering Power BI over
their data. Power BI has allowed users to make their own data discoveries and
answer their own questions.
A big vision with
small steps
The approach of starting will small projects and expanding
where most needed is what made this BI project so successful for this client. Focusing
on resolving the most urgent reporting needs has helped prove to the business
leaders the positive impact that Power BI can bring across teams. This has
increased buy-in into the project and increased adoption across the
organisation.
The first step was to tackle sales reporting. The sales
manager was an early adopter of Power BI, a self-starter who dove deep into the
data and was able to analyse data and share insights with the rest of the team.
Every week, the sales team gets together and reviews the Power BI sales
dashboard. They instantly drill down to understand how they can improve and
follow up a week later to measure the impact of their actions. Seeing this
positive change and the results it drives has motivated other teams to follow
the same path.
The advantages of
Power BI
With Power BI being part of the Microsoft family, users find
familiarity in its look and feel. It is a tool built for the business users, in
that they can self-serve their data questions without the need to involve
technical people. In addition, Microsoft has made available many tutorial
videos which make it easy for more confident users to self-teach how to create
and amend their own reports.
We live in an era where having access to a vast amount of
data is seen as a big advantage. We think the more the better. However, many
times having access to all this data can be overwhelming for users. They do not
know how to interpret data and how to use it to make decisions
Business intelligence tools can make such a big difference
to our performance at work, yet they are perceived as a scary and complicated
tool. Starting with a small project that delivers maximum impact in the
reporting process for business users, may be the best approach for a project. The
small, positive impacts will spread across the organisation and the change will
happen.
The post Big vision. Small steps. appeared first on Enterprise Software Blog – Professional Advantage.
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