Today, implementing a business intelligence tool in the company does not only allow for the extraction, organization and storage of the data generating a list of corporate reports, but it also offers the user reports that are impressive, interactive and immediate.
If the user wants to know "what territory had the lowest order conversion rate last month", they want to be able to ask it in their own language and get an answer that allows them to see directly what they are looking for and easily navigate to the origin of the situation or its side effects.
If they are also offered a personalized result, with all the information they need in one place, mobile access if required, automatic updates as often as necessary and the ability to evolve/modify what they are seeing to suit their specific requirements, they are given the freedom to explore and discover new perspectives and, ultimately, make timely, informed and secure decisions in their company.
What tools can I use to get all this?
Excel is not the first tool we think of when we talk about data visualization in a Business Intelligence system, but it is the most used analytical tool by business users, as it is very accessible. No other solution has the capacity to reach one billion users through tools they already know and use. Today, Excel offers end-to-end self-service BI functionality through capabilities such as Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map. With Excel's accessibility, the accuracy given by the connection to analytics services, and the proliferation of Office 365, the entry barrier is reduced for businesses that want to start reaping the benefits of business intelligence.
Power BI, Microsoft's business intelligence tool, allows us to incorporate data from different sources and create a model that allows us to relate them for later visualization. We have the possibility to analyze our information and share it with other users of the company both online and offline, in the office or through mobile devices.
For this we have the following components at our disposal:
Using visual objects in Power BI Desktop is one of the easiest ways to generate and share reports with our data. It has multiple standard visuals that are incorporated into the reports without the need for programming (graphics, tables, interactive maps...), with a very large Marketplace maintained by the user community and also has the ability to create our own custom visual objects and pack them as a file so they can be imported into any Power BI report we want to generate.
If we also need to transform and model the data obtained from the source before painting them, we can execute DAX functions to obtain calculated columns and metrics.
Pyramid is a product by the company Pyramid Analytics, which focuses on Business Analytics and is based in Amsterdam. It offers self-service analytics services as well as BI systems.
Pyramid consists of six modules: modeling, discovery, formulation, illustration, presentation and publication. The illustration module, which is the subject of this post, allows users to create graphs based on data, texts and infographics ready to present or publish. Pyramid offers 36 graphics, which can be extended to more than 150 different views. In particular, this tool offers:
Tableau is an American company recently acquired by the customer management software giant Salesforce. Gartner has considered it a leader in its Magic Quadrant for several years, even though it has been superseded by Microsoft in recent years.
Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps simplify data and convert it into easily understandable formats. This tool allows the creation of dashboards and worksheets, as well as fast data analysis. The visualizations you get with Tableau are simple, so even non-technical users can easily unwrap with the tool.
With Tableau we can:
QlikTech is a company founded in Sweden in 1993 and now headquartered in the USA. It is a Business Intelligence company focused on business discovery.
Its QlikSense tool allows non-technical users to view data and ask questions. The goal of QlikSense is to allow you to ask and answer questions that arise from the graphical representation of data.
QlikSense enables to:
Business Objects was born in 1990 in Paris and was acquired by the German SAP in 2008.
Business Objects has a reporting and business intelligence tool, which offers reporting applications that allow users to discover information, analyze and achieve data insights, and create reports that enable clear visualization of this data. Business Objects has two products, Business Objects Edge Edition, aimed at mid-sized companies, and Business Objects Enterprise, which is aimed at large corporations.
Business Objects allows to:
Microstrategy is an American company founded in 1989 that offers OLAP and BI software.
Microstrategy has a business intelligence tool whose platform supports interactive dashboards, formatted reports, report distribution, etc.
With Microstrategy we can:
When choosing the data visualization tool we must take into account aspects such as its connection capabilities with the tools we currently have, the cost of licensing, what type of users will handle it, its scalability, ease of use and the product life cycle offered by its manufacturer.
Anna Farrés | Presales Manager