Welcome to the latest P3 Adaptive Coffee Talk, where members of the community discuss various topics related to Power BI, Power Pivot, and Analytics/BI in general. These conversations take place during the week on a Slack channel, and are then lightly edited for publication. In this installment of our Coffee Talk series, we’ll be chatting with Per Solli and Travis Buckingham about PowerON BI’s Power Planner. Let’s introduce everyone:
Per Solli is the CEO of PowerON BI, whose mission is to enable Corporate Performance Management Solutions based on Power BI.
Travis Buckingham is the Director of Finance and Market Analytics for Stewart Title. He has over a decade of experience as a financial consultant, developing and managing financial budgets, to go along with his years of mastering Tableau, SQL, and Power BI.
Austin Senseman is a CFA Charterholder, former CPA, Excel Power User, and SQL Server Professional. Oh, and he’s still VP Operations here at P3 Adaptive
Ryan Sullivan, is a lead consultant here at P3 Adaptive who spent his early days turning Excel files into PDFs and other worthwhile endeavors. In his search for “a better way” he came across the P3 Adaptive blog and became an avid follower. He has since become a full stack developer for Microsoft Business Intelligence tools with a soft spot for removing the drudgery from everyday business data tasks.
Welcome and Introductions
PowerON and Power Planner
Power Update has become a swiss army knife for a lot of Business Analysts. Rob Collie and Power ON’s development team put their heads together and filled a gap that is now thousands of licensed users are benefiting from. Power Update can refresh any ‘M’ Power Query in Excel or Power BI desktop, and publish it anywhere, including sending emails with attachments.
A nice feature I know Travis can elaborate more on is Power SQL. It basically loads all your Power Queries and loads them to a SQL database.
This is not today’s topic, but I am know all your readers will benefit from Power Update and Power SQL.
Now to Power Planner:
Power Planner is a Powerful Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting solution, and enables organization a true solution where ALL data resides in the same location, AND is being used by same Self Service BI Application, Power BI and Excel. Power Planner also works on ANY data model that the user develop, and doesn’t have rigorous proprietory tables and structures for users to learn. You can build all this with:
Excel, Some SQL knowledge, and DAX.
The Power of ‘M’ has been discussed in many twitter threads and discussion boards, and some people even here at Power Pivot Pro says that Power BI wouldn’t existed without M.
When it comes to the Planning Processes, you can use these MS Technologies to build your self-service datamart, and start doing your own ‘Planning’ and data collection.
Soothing Those Pain Points
Ryan, this is what has been so great with the relationship to P3. You enable professionals, and we can help automate a lot of tedious tasks.
As I mentioned earlier, we can load data from Power Pivot models to SQL. Today we are launching a ‘Rules Engine’. It is required for allocations and transferring data between models.
With the Power Planner Rules Engine you can now write any DAX EVALUATE statement, and write it to any SQL database you have access to. More to come in the next few days.
Thank you for asking about the typical profile for the Power ON user:
Our clients do have some traits in common. It is the Business Analysts with missing or lacking data, and a GREAT desire to see his or her data in Power BI!!!
Some process we currently support with Power ON’s products:
- Load data from SalesForce/MS CRM, mix it with historical information, and now you can create a complete forecasting solution with Landed Business, Closing Business, and Prospective business. This give you a real agile benefit.
- The worlds largest producer of iodine has a solution in place that projects every shipment, in every packaging to every hospital in the US and around the world. It helps save lives.
- A public 70Bn dollar US based software company is using Power ON for projecting new sales and maintaining training opportunities with Power ON solutions and Power BI.
What they all have in common is that “They can’t wait for the DW to reload data” they need it now, and need to see the impact immediately.
People that love our tools, love to please the CFO, by creating unlimited number of scenarios and help creating forecast for Cash Flow and how to Fund the growth of the business
I was going to ask next what’s on the horizon and what get’s you excited about working in this space. These are all great examples of amazing functionality and success and we can see it’s hard for you to contain your excitement!
I wake up every morning and think: YES!!! Planning and Forecasting and BI is now finally ONE solution. It make me giggle every time i think of it.
BI is seeing a new spring with self-service. Pessimists was projecting that self-service would day a death of data quality. The other day i was reading a thread on LinkedIN that Self Service BI had helped increase the quality of data. Better together.
CPM(Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting) is soooooo old and outdated. Ugh. With Power ON Visual Planner and Power BI you can do it all in one new fresh tool. The companies that continue to do budgets in legacy budget systems or Excel will evaporate very soon.
The solution is what IBM is doing with merging TM1 and Watson. In the Microsoft camp you have Power BI and Power ON. Both build in one powerful hosted or on-premises solution. The other one just happen to be as powerful, but much less expensive. :slightly_smiling_face:
In the
1990’s – 75 years
2000’s – 17-25 years
2010’s – 7 years.
Wrapping Up
I always ask myself and ponder why we don’t all go to https://blockbuster.com to watch a move, or take pictures with a Kodak camera. I went to College in the 90’s and why don’t I use Word Perfect and Lotus……
Future is here much faster than it used to be. Companies need to adopt to change MUCH quicker than we used to. And when change hits, you need to have a plan, and you don’t have time to reload the datawarehouse to make sure we have integrity in historical data. We need to have agile processes and tools that can support and assist smart brains to make even better decisions.
Power ON’s Visual Planning solution, you get:
- Integration with 75 data sources through Power Query.
- Power Update to schedule the loading, even partial loading to SQL.
- Powerful Rules Engine that can post any calculated rule to SQL
- Tabular Editor to manage any SQL Table in Power BI
- Matrix for Allocations and Goal Seeking of DAX formulas
- Workflow and Cycle Management right in Power BI
- User Notifications with emails and Event Driven notifications.
This framework is hosted and built by Microsoft. Power ON is the glue, super-glue that makes it all come together, with close partnerships with the experts at Power Pivot Pro?
Here is what I hope Power ON and Power BI can become for every business user:
One harsh winter day I was flying from Norway to LAX, with a pit-stop in Chicago. When we landed in Chicago it was a recordbreaking -40 F. If you haven’t experienced it, I will guarantee you’ll never want to. As you can imagine, it was a complete chaos with people, delays, luggage and long lines.
I picked up the phone and called my airline, and I was stumped from what I heard from the automated attendant:
“Based on the number you are calling from, we believe you are ‘Per Solli’, press 1. We have rebooked you on a flight for tomorrow morning at 8.10am, press 1 to confirm. We have booked you in at the Double Tree, press 1 to confirm. …”
20 minutes later I sat infront of the fireplace with a glass or red wine and enjoyed the warm and cosy experience….. That is artificial intelligence to me….and I was actually flying economy.
Where It’s At: The Intersection of Biz, Human, and Tech*
We “give away” business-value-creating and escape-the-box-inspiring content like this article in part to show you that we’re not your average “tools” consulting firm. We’re sharp on the toolset for sure, but also on what makes businesses AND human beings “go.”
In three days’ time imagine what we can do for your bottom line. You should seriously consider finding out 🙂
* – unless, of course, you have two turntables and a microphone. We hear a lot of things are also located there.
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