How Top Industries are Using Power BI
We’re back with another article on Business Intelligence - this week we’re looking at how top industries such as healthcare, retail and finance are leveraging Power BI to enhance operations and decision making. If you’re wondering how this instrumental tool could benefit your industry, keep reading.
As we saw in our first blog post of the month, organisations produce stacks of data, but it can be challenging to interpret that data and do something meaningful with it, especially as the business grows. Business Intelligence has become instrumental in transforming how many industries access and interpret their data, and Microsoft Power BI is a market leading tool that makes this a breeze, enabling users to easily access and view the data they want to.
Professional services and manufacturing take the lead
To understand the widespread impact of Power BI, let’s first examine its overall usage across various sectors. According to Apps Run the World, a prominent technology intelligence and market research firm, the professional services sector is the largest user of Microsoft Power BI, closely followed by the manufacturing industry.
Additionally, Power BI's adoption is most prominent in the United States and the United Kingdom, highlighting its global reach and effectiveness. Below, we delve into other industries and take a look at some notable companies within these sectors that are making use of this game-changing tool to gain key insights and improve decision-making.
Retail
Within the retail sector, Power BI is not just a tool but an extremely valuable strategic asset. From real-time sales tracking to inventory forecasting, retail companies use Power BI to make well-informed decisions that directly impact their bottom line. Online behavioural marketing becomes more targeted and effective with the insights gleaned from Power BI dashboards. Walmart, for example, wanted to create a scalable, cost-effective platform to format and present their financial data. They chose Power BI for its ability to deliver this information to end users quickly, easily and across platforms.
Healthcare
The healthcare industry relies heavily on accurate, current data for informed decision-making. Power BI is an instrumental tool in helping healthcare organisations to enhance operational efficiency and patient outcomes. The NHS utilises Power BI to automate tasks, provide real-time insights, and make better-informed decisions. Clinical analytics, patient monitoring, and operational metrics are streamlined, contributing to improved healthcare services.
Finance
In the financial sector, Power BI is useful for monitoring investments, trades, and risks. Metro Bank, for instance, has used Power BI to enhance the banking experience. Power BI has given Metro Bank a competitive edge as they can easily interpret their data and adapt to customer needs. They use it to collect call volume service levels, customer demographics, types of transactions from online customers, tracking customer complaints etc. The CEO of Metro Bank has referred to Power BI as a ‘bank in his pocket’ because in just a few clicks the company can view and interpret company data.
Insurance
For the insurance industry, Power BI aids in claim analysis, underwriting, and identifying new opportunities. It serves as a unifying force, bringing together disparate communication channels and manual systems. AG Insurance has provided a range of insurance products for nearly 200 years across Belgium. They adopted Power BI to revamp their platform and give them more insights and scalability to enhance the customer experience.
Manufacturing
Power BI proves invaluable in manufacturing, facilitating production monitoring, quality control, and supply chain analysis. Using Power BI, plant managers have personalised goods, reduced time to market, boosted efficiency, and developed a more sustainable and lucrative business model, optimised for service productivity.
Construction
The construction industry can benefit from Power BI by tracking projects, ensuring safety, managing materials (including reuse), labour, Co2 emissions, and monitoring budgets. Power BI can help to show any risks in pre-financing projects, as well as to have an overview of how well the company is performing. It can help you to see how often service orders are not resolved, and the type of work that has longer lead times, among other things.
Education
Power BI enables educational institutions to monitor student performance, demographics, and attendance which enhance educational outcomes. The University of Oxford uses Power BI to track a wide range of data, including admissions and on-course student information, administrative research data, purchasing, training, and HR data. The University of Manchester has also adopted the use of Power BI to track various aspects of student information, such as academic engagement and performance, extracurricular activities, and admission processes. This allows the university to identify areas for improving enrolment figures and overall student success, among other things. For practical examples, here is a handy school data dashboard: whole school summary.
Transportation
One of the UK's busiest airports, Heathrow, is using Power BI to effectively track their data to stay ahead of any disruption that can cause stress for passengers. Chief Information Officer at Heathrow, Stuart Birrell said, "With Power BI, we can very quickly connect to a wide range of data sources with very little effort and use this data to run Heathrow more smoothly than ever before."
Through real-world examples we can see how Power BI isn't just a tool; it's a transformative force reshaping how businesses operate, make decisions, and thrive. Power BI experts will be able to take your data, including from multiple sources, clean, model and visualise it exactly how you want it and present you with user-friendly reports and dashboards. At Red Eagle Tech our Power BI Experts are on hand to help you. Get in touch today.
