Can you share your experiences with using Power BI as a self-service BI tool?

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COO in Finance (non-banking)10 months ago

Accessibility of information to a broad set of audience/stakeholders is the most helpful. It becomes the norm to work closely with the data team to understand the information.

Director of Portfolio Marketing in Software10 months ago

I’ve used PowerBI for self service BI and I find it particularly useful in the data exploration stage when you want to quickly pull up a few graphs to look at the data in difference ways, after you’ve set up your data models and are confident in the data you are using.

VP of IT10 months ago

This question elicits one of my most frequent quotes I share with our business leaders - "Just because you CAN create a report doesn't mean you should". The self-service Power BI capabilities are really good - most anyone can create reports. The result though is a lot of waste, inefficient reports, replicated data ... without any governance you just create a mess and senseless costs.

Executive Director of Technology in Healthcare and Biotech2 years ago

PowerBI is excellent, and in my perspective, as a self-service solution, it’s more user-friendly and intuitive compared to other similar products, although I know some would disagree.

That being said, it should primarily be utilized for conducting basic graphing and preliminary estimations. It's crucial to have a comprehensive enterprise/group data and analytics strategy in place to ensure baseline reporting consistency and accuracy. If the reporting is complex, relying on disparate tools can pose significant risks, and it is preferable to adhere to standardized, established systems and tools for robust and intricate analytical needs.

Director of Finance2 years ago

Power BI is a good self service tool but one of the con is shadow reports with no data reconciliation in sight.

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Not a poll but looking to get thoughts. We are about 70% deployed on SAP ECC. We know we need to get to S/4 in next 5-6 years. Do we:
1 - Stop deployments, upgrade the deployed to S/4, then finish deployments.
2 - Finish deployments and then upgrade all to S/4 (or could stay on ECC forever!).
3 - Stop deploying on ECC, finish deployments on S/4, then convert ECC over to S/4.
Option 1 & 2 would likely be Brown or Blue upgrade, but possible in option 2 to kick off Greenfield (redeploy) after finish of ECC deployments. Option 3 would likely by Green.
70% deployed is large parts of business, 30% remaining is mostly the cats and dogs.
Remaining 30% would likely take 2-3 years.
Option 3 puts us into new interface situation where we would have 3 ERPs for some time, Legacy, ECC and S/4, with the integration work throw away as end state is only S/4.
Legacy is old and lacks capability, but not on fire. Resources are retiring.
Current ECC is heavily customized with lots of capabilities build into the core.
We are a large multi-national business with significant manufacturing.

SAP ECC to S/4 upgrade. 2030 is fast approaching. For companies over $1b that have been on SAP for > 10 years. Still a lot of us out there. Where are you?

We are done! (Please add comment on success factors or mistakes)7%

We have plan in place and executing. (Please add comments on progress and any pitfalls)52%

Dabbling. We have some S/4 but not tackled ECC. (Please add where you dabbled in comments) 38%

We (IT) really wants to move, but struggling to find a business case.31%

Waiting to see if SAP caves and extends support beyond 2030. 9%

Other? 2%