Deploying BI reporting without large initial investments

BI reporting has become one of the most important tools for leading with data. However, building and maintaining BI reporting is often seen as laborious and costly. What should be considered when building BI reporting, and how can the cost of BI reporting be significantly reduced?

BI reporting in a nutshell

BI reporting automates and digitizes reporting, which has been traditionally implemented using Excel. Business Intelligence (BI) tools used in BI reporting retrieve data from the systems used by the organization and automatically convert it into visual reports. BI reporting makes it possible to present reported data in various figures, graphs, and maps.

BI reporting effectively provides depth to the report data. BI reports are interactive, and the user can filter them with different filters and change the analysis methods with a few clicks. BI reporting allows you to drill deep into key figures and see what they consist of. BI reporting also allows creating future forecasts and budgets.

How does BI reporting enhance leading with data?

• Enables in-depth analytics easily and with high quality.
• Helps to understand what the figures consist of.
• Allows combining data from different systems into unified reports.
• Improves reporting quality.
• Removes manual reporting steps.
• Makes it easier to share reports.
• Reduces time used reporting.
• Combines the reporting of various companies in the same group.
• Displays data with easy-to-read and clear visuals instead of numbers.

What should you consider when moving to BI reporting?

BI tools retrieve reportable data from different target systems using integrations. Building integrations is one of the key elements in setting up BI reporting. Building and maintaining integrations typically take a lot of time and require technical expertise.

Another significant expense in BI reporting is building a data warehouse if you want to use one. Utilizing a data warehouse is more than recommended for BI reporting if data is retrieved from multiple systems.

In the data warehouse, the raw data is modeled and processed into a suitable format before being sent to BI tools. This streamlines and speeds up BI report loading times, as the data is already in a format suitable for BI tools. However, the work related to the data warehouse does not end with its construction. Its regular maintenance also requires the expertise of the Data Engineer. BI reporting also typically requires building report templates for different business needs.

How to reduce the cost of BI reporting without reducing quality?

The costs of BI reporting consist of, e.g., the licenses required to use BI tools, building integrations with different systems, building and maintaining a data warehouse, and reporting templates created by experts.

BI Book reporting tool was created to give every company handy access to BI reporting without a large initial investment. BI Book utilizes Microsoft Power BI and provides its users with a ready-made data warehouse, as well as report templates created for various systems and the licenses required to use Power BI. BI Book also has pre-built integrations with more than 50 systems.

One example of how BI reporting could look like with BI Book:

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