Power BI Consulting Services

Think like an enterprise. Move like a startup.

Transform raw data into actionable insights and gain a competitive edge by leveraging the previously inaccessible power of Microsoft’s Power BI platform.

SEAMLESS DATA INTEGRATION & TOTAL VISIBILITY

Pretty BI Dashboards + Intelligent Data Model = Business Impact

End to end visibility of your business starts with end to end data integration. Our Power BI consultants build solid and accurate data models that cross business systems so that you can see more and do more.

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ACTIONABLE & REAL-TIME INSIGHTS

Cross silo KPIs will transform your business

Power BI is the key to dismantling barriers and unlocking the insights necessary for effective, well-informed leadership in an interconnected world. At P3, we empower leaders to break down communication and technological silos to derive actionable, real-time insights across every facet of your organization. Gain the confidence to navigate cross-silo decision-making, backed by a unified and comprehensive understanding of your business data when you implement Power BI.

IMPROVEMENT AT SCALE

Every Power BI win makes the next win easier

Harness the power of data with Power BI to make data-driven decisions, addressing current challenges while gaining a strategic, long-term advantage. Investing in understanding and leveraging your data creates a compounding effect, leading to continuous business improvement. Unlock the potential for sustained growth and success as your analytics efforts with Power BI compound over time.

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Our Approach To Power BI Consulting

Their approach

Infrastructure Forward

GOAL:

Business Value

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Start

Infrastructure-Oriented Approach

Traditional consultants overhaul your entire system first, delaying insights and costing you time and resources. By the time you’re set to go, the goalposts have moved.

Our approach

Impact Forward

GOAL:

Business Value

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Start

Impact-Oriented Approach

P3 Adaptive will help you start winning now. We leverage Power BI and your current systems to quickly deliver the key insights, reducing costs and risk.

Mike Miskell

Director of Process Improvement, Kaman Industrial Technologies

“Lifechanging. It’s made me a better analyst, and I recommend this courses to folks all over my organization. We’re able to build complex models in a matter of weeks, and use a few great DAX patterns to fix reporting issues that otherwise would have taken months or years to develop!”

Interested in getting started with our Power BI Consultants?

Custom Power BI solutions built to propel your business forward, and specialized training designed to unlock the potential of your Power BI ecosystem and the team using it.

P3 is a proud partner of Microsoft.

Put simply, we would not be able to create transformative solutions for our clients without Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology. Power BI, Azure, and Fabric allow us to do what we do best.

That is why P3 is proud to be an official Solutions Partner of Microsoft, delivering the capabilities of big tech to the businesses who need it most.

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WHY P3

A new age of data consulting.

We distrust consultants, too.

That’s why P3 is pioneering a new type of Power BI consulting services, with people you trust and people who deliver. Our consultants are a rare blend of engineering genius and business savvy. We use both sides of our brains to get you results, making us one of the most effective Power BI consulting companies.

P3 TRAINING

Custom Power BI dashboard solutions, without gatekeeping.

Expert Guidance


Benefit from the experience of our seasoned Power BI consultants. Receive expert guidance on best practices, data visualization, and optimization.

Empower Your Team


Equip your team with the skills and knowledge needed to extract valuable insights from Power BI. We ensure that your team maximizes the benefits, even when we’re not around anymore.

Tailored Solutions


We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Our data solutions are custom built to address the unique challenges and goals of your business.

Our founder helped create Power BI. Then he wrote the book on it.

Before starting P3 Adaptive, Rob Collie played a pivotal role in shaping the landscape of business intelligence as one of the key contributors to the creation of Power BI at Microsoft. Following this instrumental role, Collie continues to be a driving force in the Power BI community, and authored a comprehensive book on Power BI that provided invaluable insights and expertise. Today, his vision powers P3 Adaptive, and by extension, transformative success for our clients.

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Case Study

How Kuraray turned Power BI data into decisions.

“That’s what Power BI does. It gives you the tools and techniques to drill down, look at the data in different ways, and get what you need to make decisions.”

  • Reached their goal of reducing inventory by 18% in just one month.
  • Successfully braced for the impact of Covid-19.
  • Plan to eliminate all manual reporting and rely on Power BI across their organization.

Reach your full potential.

Start taking advantage of big company talent, technology, and resources.

The Power BI platform is an incredibly versatile and powerful tool, especially in the hands of those who know how to use it. Let’s dive in and look at everything Power BI can do and why working with Power BI consulting services might make sense for your business.

How Can Power BI Dashboard Consulting Help Your Company?

Using Power BI dashboards effectively puts business leaders in control of their data. Imagine being able to quickly access data visualizations and interpret vital data in real time to create actionable insights, without waiting for assistance from technical resources. With dashboards created by a power BI expert, you can quickly implement Power BI and have 24/7 access to real time data reporting and analysis, enabling you to quickly make important decisions.

Well-built BI dashboards help you to:

  • Improve organizational efficiency
  • Optimize organizational processes
  • Speed up decision making with accurate data
  • Increase sales and long-term profitability
  • Discover new market opportunities and trends
  • Quickly identify issues in your company

What Is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a comprehensive business intelligence tool that includes top-tier capabilities for visualization, data modeling, data transformation (aka ETL – Extract, Transform, and Load), advanced analytics, data analysis expressions, and artificial intelligence. It is Microsoft’s flagship tool in the BI space.

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What Are The Unique Benefits Of Power BI Desktop?

Compared to its competitors, Power BI is far more comprehensive in its capabilities across the entire data pipeline. Tableau, for example, is very strong in visualization but much weaker in data modeling and ETL. Power BI is, therefore, a far more flexible and agile tool that allows businesses to quickly pivot their analyses in new directions without requiring new infrastructural investments that the other tools almost universally require.

In addition to being by far the most comprehensive and agile of the modern BI tools, Power BI is also deeply integrated with the rest of the Microsoft platform, from Office and SharePoint to Azure and Fabric. None of Power BI’s competitors bring a similar network of integrated benefits.

Somewhat counterintuitively, given its many advantages, Power BI is also far more affordable than its competitors, costing a fraction of the price of other tools. Combined with its comprehensive support for the entire BI lifecycle and its superior agility, Power BI implementation costs are often an order of magnitude more economical than projects executed with other tools.

In short, Power BI:Is more comprehensiveIs more flexibleIs more agileOffers more integrationsIs more affordable

Let’s be clear: There’s a WIDE range of what you’ll find in terms of Power BI consultants. Given that it’s very easy to connect Power BI to a single raw data source and immediately begin building visualizations and dashboards, the barrier to entry to advertising oneself as a Power BI consultant is low, and there are no regulations for power BI training. While it’s a very good thing for aspiring analysts that the tool has a gentle onramp in terms of learning curve, a frightening percentage of so-called Power BI consultants possess only surface-level knowledge of the toolset.

What Do Power BI Consultants Do?

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In the hands of those with skin-deep expertise, Power BI rarely delivers on its amazing promise. We’ve seen this first hand when we’ve been hired by companies who are considering abandoning Power BI, and we quickly discover that they were misusing its capabilities – either due to a lack of internal expertise or because they hired a consultant who overrepresented their own expertise. The right Power BI Consultants completely change this. Power BI consultants assist in Power BI Implementation, building Power BI dashboards, and analyzing and visualizing data. When Power BI consultants apply Power BI properly, the client quickly sees data wins – often within a week or two – that eluded them for months or years prior.

Power BI Consultant Skills

So, what are the skills that differentiate the pretenders from the experts? Note that these skills are important whether you are aspiring to become a Power BI consultant and/or land a Power BI consulting job but also if you are looking to hire a Power BI consulting company for business intelligence solutions.

A Power BI expert consultant:Is a good communicator and is able to understand the business problems facing the clientAsks a lot of questions about what the stakeholders are trying to achieveUnderstand the power and flexibility of star schema data models and not just flat-table viewsKnows how to use Power Query to clean and shape source data before ingesting it into their Power BI data modelsIs skilled at the DAX language, allowing them to implement a wide range of business logic into metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – both in DAX calculated columns and in DAX measuresKnows their way around the Power BI cloud service, including security, gateways, and scheduled refreshIs able to move quickly enough that the client can participate in semi-real time during the Power BI implementation, replacing the reliance on expensive and slow requirements docs with lightweight and crisp communication (whether via live meetings, phone calls, or instant messaging)

How Much Does Power BI Consulting Cost?

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Power BI consulting rates can vary quite a bit. Some of the authorities in the space charge more than $500 an hour, whereas offshore resources can be priced under $50 an hour. Some Power BI consultants avoid hourly rates altogether and charge per-project fees, but in our experience, that only works well in narrow circumstances when the project is 100% transparently clear from the beginning. In our experience, most Power BI implementation projects inherently involve the discovery of unknowns – both obstacles AND opportunities – that were invisible before getting started. Consultants who charge per-project rates most often insulate themselves against the risk of the unknown by significantly padding and inflating their project cost rates, which can create a winner/loser dynamic relationship with the client.

We prefer to stick to hourly rates while remaining 100% committed to following the absolute most cost-effective path to delivering on our clients’ ambitions. We’d much rather win our clients’ trust – and future business – than extract a predatory margin and damage the relationship.

What Is Power BI Implementation?

A “Power BI implementation” can mean one of two different things: the focused creation of a dashboard or set of dashboards to address a specific purpose or the overall adoption of Power BI as an organization’s preferred BI tool.

Meaning One: Focused Creation of Power BI Dashboards

Focused Power BI dashboard implementations deliver immediate value to the client organization. Still, they are often the best way for an organization to evaluate Power BI for potential adoption as the tool of choice. As hinted above, these focused implementations begin with a “mind meld” between consultant and client oriented around the client’s needs and ambitions for the project. 

What is the status quo? What are the pain points? How do we expect things to improve if we implement the dashboard(s)? Who will be using them, and what decisions will they be using them to make? What are the data sources that will be required, and where do those data sources “live” today?

From there, actual Power BI development can begin, taking place at three distinct layers – the reports/dashboards/visualizations layer, the data model layer (which feeds the visuals), and the ETL Power Query pipeline (which feeds the data model). Even though these layers form a natural sequence of ETL -> Data Model -> Visuals, Power BI is at its best when the consultant can rapidly iterate through all three layers nearly simultaneously. 

Power BI experts think backward from the desired visuals and immediately see the data model, and ETL required to provide it. Sometimes, a single end goal can be achieved nearly effortlessly with a savvy change in one layer while being prohibitively expensive if shoehorned into one of the other two layers. If a Power BI consultant rigidly locks themself into a sequential or waterfall approach to the three layers, these efficient solutions elude them.

Meaning Two: Adopting Power BI

Suppose implementation instead means adopting Power BI as the organization’s preferred BI tool. In that case, the focus is obviously not on any single need but rather on instituting an effective org-wide culture and capability. Identification of audiences and roles is an important and often neglected first step. Who will be your authors, your consumers, your administrators, and your invested stakeholders? Your authors will be your Power BI developers but also your primary Power BI ambassadors – the advocates for the tool as well as the go-between where all of the other audiences’ concerns meet. These authors will be the primary targets of your adoption plan. 

Power BI instructor-led training and/or pre-recorded Power BI courses will be valuable primarily to them, and these Authors are also often the right people to cooperate with Power BI-partner consulting firms on specific projects in the early going. In our experience, training is most effective when immediately followed by the execution of a Power BI project in collaboration with a more seasoned Power BI expert.

How Do I Choose The Best Power BI Consulting Provider?

It can be hard to say who is the best consultant for your needs objectively. But there ARE definitely things to look for.

The best Power BI consulting firms:

  • Never lock you in. If they want six-figure commitments up front, they prefer their clients to be captured.
  • Are transparent. They don’t hoard knowledge to gain advantage of you.
  • Are supportive of a hybrid model. If you want to understand how something works so you can do it yourself in the future, they are happy to explain it and teach you how to do it.
  • Are focused on the improvements you are trying to make as a company and not on the tech itself. Within the first week of engagement, you feel like you’re talking to a business ally (who happens to be great at tech) and not to a software developer or IT professional.
  • Hire only the very best consultants. At P3, we hire less than 2% of our applicants because we need them to be highly proficient at so many distinct skills, such as the three phases of Power BI development, business acumen, and communication skills, change management, project management, and management/governance strategy.

If that sounds like a lot to look for, good news. Personally, we think you’ve already found the best right here (heh heh).

How Do I Know My Company Could Benefit From Power BI Consulting?

Once your company reaches around $25 million in annual revenue, Power BI consulting provides more than enough ROI to be a significant net positive, as long as you’re hiring the right kind of firm. We like to joke that “if there’s money at stake in your organization, and you have data, we can help.”

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At that scale, even a modest 1% profitability improvement more than pays for itself very quickly. Organizations of that size tend to possess already more than enough data richness to mine for value (and sufficient complexity to overcome). Those sorts of gains are nearly always attainable.

Other specific indicators include: Your organization spends significant manual effort to produce reportsYou frequently depend on spreadsheets to power your decision-makingYou have to run multiple reports – often from different systems – in order to try to get the whole pictureNew and valuable questions take so long to answer that you learn not even to ask themYou struggle to answer the question, “Why do these reports, dashboards, etc. exist?”You have an existing BI system (including Power BI), but it never is able to provide the information you actually needIT is responsible for all reporting, and they are buried under a backlog and slow to deliverDifferent departments within your organization frequently disagree on the values of important metrics, or you’re not sure you can trust the reports you’re givenEven when you have trustworthy metrics, you struggle to drive improvement in those metrics or to formulate strategies for improvement

How P3 Adaptive’s Power BI Consulting Team Can Help with Business Intelligence Services

At P3 Adaptive, we know just how useful Power BI can be, especially when wielded by experts. That’s exactly why we have spent years cultivating a competent and service-oriented Power BI consulting team of experts to help you get the most out of your Power BI experience. With our help, you can unlock data intelligence that not only gives you a competitive edge now, but keeps you ahead of the game. To learn more about how we can help your team create Power BI solutions, contact us today.