Do you spend countless hours manually updating reports or struggling to extract meaningful insights from scattered business data? You’re not alone. Disconnected and unstructured data create significant bottlenecks in decision-making processes. In fact, an estimated 68 percent of workers are struggling with the volume and pace of work.

So how do you close the gap? A good start is with AI and low and no-code tools like Microsoft Power BI and Copilot. Even those without a developer or data science background can use Power BI and Copilot to create useful and insightful reports, generate actionable insights, and share the results easily with coworkers.

Power BI Storytelling: End-To-End

To illustrate the practical impact of Power BI and Copilot, let’s use a real-world scenario. Consider Sarah, a business analyst at a growing retail company. Sarah struggles with manual data preparation, removing duplicates, correcting formatting inconsistencies, and trying to merge disparate datasets.

She manually updates multiple Excel spreadsheets monthly, reconciling sales data from SQL databases, pulling marketing performance metrics from Google Analytics, and manually cross-referencing CRM records. It’s time-consuming and error-prone, leading to inaccuracies, delayed reporting, and frustrated stakeholders who need quick insights to make business decisions. Sarah’s frustration peaks when answering stakeholders’ simple questions like “Can you identify monthly sales performance by region?” may take days instead of minutes.

Automating Data Consolidation

To alleviate the frustration and drive efficiency and productivity, Sarah’s company invested in Power BI. Sarah used Power BI to radically streamline the data preparation process, by automating the process of removing duplicates, standardizing dates, and merging datasets.

Now, with the data in one format and one place, Sarah used Power BI’s built-in Copilot capabilities to generate suggested report outlines based on the data. She asked Copilot to “Create a page to help me analyze sales.”  Copilot created the report by identifying the tables, fields, measures, and charts relevant to her prompt, and infusing the prepared data.

Building Interactive Dashboards

With the report in the right format, Sarah created interactive dashboards so stakeholders can drill further into the data. She used Power BI’s drag-and-drop interface to create bar charts for monthly sales trends and heatmaps for geographic sales performance.

Then, she added slicers and filters so stakeholders can refine the data views and easily filtering sales data by region, product category, or specific timeframes, ensuring they can make faster, more targeted strategic decisions.

Secure Sharing and Collaboration

Once Sarah had the analysis she needed, she used row-level security (RLS) to ensure colleagues could only access data relevant to their roles, for example, regional managers were restricted to viewing data for their specific regions. Sarah securely published the dashboards, enabling easy yet controlled access, enhancing collaboration across the organization while safeguarding sensitive business information.

Our Unique Approach

JourneyTeam is at the forefront of these innovative data-driven solutions. In fact, we were named a global finalist for Microsoft Low Code Application Development Partner of the Year in 2024. We’ve helped dozens of organizations successfully adopt Power BI and achieve significant process improvements with our Microsoft Power BI consulting services.

Our goal is to meet you wherever you are on your data and analytics journey. If you are a small or medium-sized business without an inhouse data team, we’ll help you get all your data into a structured environment, so you can craft and visualize the output using Power BI.  If you’re a larger organization, we can help you optimize the data investments you’ve already made and set a strategy for growth.

At the core of our solutions is the Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform built on Fabric, which unifies databases, data analytics, data governance, and AI/ML capabilities on a single platform. This end-to-end integration streamlines data operations for faster and more effective decision-making. It includes Power BI as the reporting and visualization component.

JourneyTeam Real-World Success Stories

Here’s just a few success stories for JourneyTeam customers who have realized significant savings with our data and Power Platform solutions:

• Integritas integrated Power BI and Power Automate into their CRM, automating analytics and improving reporting accuracy. This automation significantly boosted operational efficiency and productivity.
• JourneyTeam helped Huish Outdoors, a global scuba gear manufacturer implement Microsoft 365 to streamline their cloud security and data management processes, substantially improving data security and reducing administrative overhead.
• R.S. Hughes significantly enhanced their analytics capabilities by integrating Microsoft Azure with Power BI, dramatically improving their ROI through clearer, actionable insights, quicker decision-making, and strategic business agility.

Take the Next Step: Elevate the Value of your Data

If you’re experiencing challenges with data visibility, system inefficiencies, or process automation, JourneyTeam is here to help. We listen, we understand, and we provide the solutions that will drive your business forward.

We’ve developed our Azure Data Analytics Accelerator to implement analytics and Power BI in your Azure subscription, you can get started quickly, integrate with your existing systems and, best of all, retain full control over your data assets. It’s a flexible platform ready to grow with your business while ensuring that your data strategy always aligns to your company’s business objectives.