The 2020 pandemic proved just how fast business could change and the importance of quickly and efficiently monitoring your enterprise. This is why The General Store has partnered with Microsoft to bring Power BI integration to our customers. 

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data sources into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights, helping everyone from business leaders to beginners make informed decisions about their enterprise. Here are the top 5 reasons integrating Power BI is right for your company:

Integrating Power BI With Your POS System Ensure Full Coverage

Microsoft’s Power BI is a robust tool that provides dynamic analytics and is now easily integrated with your General Store POS system. This integration connects your POS system’s data with your choice of over 70+ connectors, allowing your business managers to pull from a wide range of data on the most popular networks such as:

• Azure (Azure Data Warehouse)
• DropBox
• Google Analytics
• OneDrive
• SalesForce
• Excel spreadsheets
• CSV files
• And data located on-premises, such as SQL Database.

Microsoft Power BI integration is easy to pair with your Azure Data Warehouse to generate reports on your last 90 days of log activity and ensures your data is protected. This integration is quick and easy, allowing you to eliminate timely and inconvenient analytic systems. In the past, managers performing analytics would have to run a report, close it, and re-run the report to look at different data ranges, departments, or stores. With Power BI, managers can change a multitude of data options, including date ranges, store selections, zip codes, and much more.

Digest Large Quantities Of Data Quickly And Easily

Power BI’s dashboard makes reading and presenting visual reports effortless, with options to make reports as straightforward or as detailed as you want. Beginners can use the Power BI desktop for quick explanations with the dashboard that shows visuals and charts, while experts can add a multitude of data points to create their own visuals and presentations.

Once managers enter their data information, the dashboard will display a window with simplified visualizations such as ribbon, scatter, stacked, or waterfall charts along with an insightful description outlining which categories influenced your data. These visuals speed up the process of discovering insights from structured and unstructured data, making it the ideal solution for any business manager.

Additionally, the dashboard features a built-in Q&A program, allowing managers to ask data-specific questions and receive fast and useful visualizations in response. Needless to say, the speed and usability of the Power BI dashboard make it a priceless addition to any POS system.

Gain Powerful Insights Into Consumer Behavior

With data connections from your most valued analytic programs, it’s easier than ever to get the insights you need about your consumer’s behavior. With Power BI integration, you can utilize hundreds of data connectors to pinpoint the information you need and analyze it at your desired speed and scale. A company’s ability to deliver successful business plans heavily relies on the depth and understanding of consumer insights–and turning those insights into actions. 

With the right data selection and Q&A’s, managers can use Power BI to achieve more comprehensive insights into customer preferences. By utilizing the data, managers can discover insights to better understand:

• Customer-Lifecycle: 
  • By using customer data and analytics, businesses can identify where customers spend the longest in their sales funnel and where they lose the most prospects in their buyer’s journey. These insights can help companies to make the organizational decisions necessary to become more profitable.

• Pricing and Promotions: 
  • Businesses can optimize data analytics to see what pricing and promotions their audiences respond to and what promotions are better left behind. These decisions can be critical influencers of customer behavior. With more data at a managers’ fingertips, a better judgment can be made, resulting in a more significant ROI.

• Stock Room Optimization
  • By utilizing Power BI, managers can see historical data and consumer behavior to predict stocking issues. Adopting an analytically driven approach to stock room distribution can help businesses determine which items should be stocked where in order to maximize profit.

Unlock The Power Of Historical And Predictive Analytics

Power BI’s advanced historical data paired with Microsoft’s AI and advanced modeling allows managers to become experts in their industry. The latest advances in Microsoft AI help prepare reports with machine learning and advance data modeling to provide predictive analytics to help managers make smarter decisions. 

By utilizing your historical data to employ predictive analytics, business managers can:

• Eliminate issues with stocking and inventory dilemmas
• Forecast trends and predict future outcomes
• Run and compare different “What If” scenarios
• Monitor and predict changing customer demands at the global and regional scales

The best part? All of these can be achieved with no coding necessary! 

Empower Employees With Cloud Capabilities

Accessing data from The General Store’s on-premise POS systems has never been easier. Power BI’s Cloud capabilities make it effortless to bring your data together into one place for greater accessibility, organization, and visibility. Power BI also enables employees to quickly create and deliver thorough and cohesive customer reports across all business channels for a small fee. For just $9.99 a month, employees can leverage Power BI Pro to view reports on the dashboard on PC, iOS, and Android devices.

The ability to share reports via the cloud allows businesses to create a collaborative work environment, providing employees with the ability to generate actionable insights in real-time regardless of location. Furthermore, employees can communicate directly through the system by adding a personal comment or starting a conversation with colleagues right on the dashboard. Businesses can manage user access with Power BI’s built-in security feature, eliminating the need to use other tools to ensure your company’s high compliance and regulatory standards are met. 

With Power Bi’s easy and insightful analytics, it’s no surprise that more companies are choosing to integrate it into their POS systems. With more insights comes more power, and Power BI’s dashboards and predictive analytics provide just that. If you’re ready to take your analytics game to the next level with an industry-leading POS system

Author Bio Amit Badia