Power BI

What Stevin gets out of Power BI

Power BI is strong and cheap if you already live in the Microsoft house: you build rich dashboards in it and the license often already sits in your subscription. We build client reports in it where the organization already runs on Microsoft and data from several sources has to come together. Where it pinches is that Power BI shows what happened, but never acts on its own. A dashboard is a mirror: a campaign sinking, a cost line running off the rails, it sits there neatly, but someone has to notice it and do something. In practice nobody looks every day. That is where Stevin steps in. Through the same dataset, Stevin reads the numbers along and raises a signal the moment a value deviates or hits a threshold, with the follow-up underneath and a person reviewing every action that carries weight first. Power BI shows, Stevin watches.

What you pair it with

Choosing Power BI means you first have to get the data into it: count on a connector or an intermediate layer that supplies your marketing, sales and customer data, because out of the box it mostly talks to Microsoft sources. It visualizes excellently, but it changes nothing about the freshness or accuracy of what you load in. In practice: invest in the data flow into Power BI, not just in the charts. A nice dashboard on slow or incomplete data gives a false sense of oversight.

Common mistakes

• →Building a dashboard nobody looks at daily, so deviations sit unaddressed.
• →Underestimating the data flow and putting nice charts on incomplete data.
• →Choosing Power BI outside the Microsoft ecosystem and running into connector work.
• →Confusing visualizing with following up: the dashboard does nothing on its own.