Frequently asked questions

BI solutions enable you to collate data from multiple sources using the ETL (Extract Transform Load) methodology. Data is moved and integrated from operational and transactional business software (ERP, HRM, CRM, etc.), databases (Excel, CSV, etc.), and third-party applications (email, social media, etc.) to a single repository using dedicated drivers. When the default driver is not defined, ODBC (Open Database Connecting) and OLE BD (Object Linking and Embedding Database) are configured to provide access to data in different formats.

This is a critical step for an efficient and high-performing BI system; hence it is necessary to bring on board specialists experienced in this domain to implement this process effectively.

ERP | CRM | HRM | OAS | Financial system | eCommerce Inventory management system | Marketing tools | Third-party applications

At PBI Analytics, we provide BI solutions tailored to your needs. This includes delivering a suitable licensing version of the system that suits your needs. The majority of the Power BI technologies that we configure are available to use as:

• License per server (no user limit)
• Or license per user (a limited number of specified users)

Depending on your strategic objectives and budget, you can choose the licensing framework that works best for you. What’s more, many of the BI solutions we deploy enable you to export or download reports in different formats (.xlsx, .pptx,.pdf, .docx), making it possible for you to share reports unless prohibited by your licensing agreement.

BI is a specialized field. Your IT team may not be equipped with the tools, knowledge, experience, and expertise required to implement a complex BI system. Therefore, to harness the potential of BI in a cost-efficient manner, it is necessary to hire professionals accomplished in this domain. It is important to note that this is a collaborative endeavor that requires the involvement and cooperation of your IT team.

With X+ BI solutions deployed successfully, PBI Analytics is proficient at building the BI capabilities and architecture your enterprise requires to grow and thrive in this modern era of data science and cloud computing.

• Save time with our proven methodologies
• Maintain data integrity
• Optimise data to generate value
• Custom-designed platforms
• Scalable, agile & robust solutions
• State-of-the-art technologies
• Cost-effective solutions
• Hands-on experience in this domain
• Enhanced data security and privacy
• Maintenance and support services
• Microsoft Gold partner

The core function of an ERP system is collecting information for integrating the various functions within an enterprise to provide an operational view of the business. A BI system, on the other hand, focuses on consolidating and transforming this information for the purpose of data analysis and visualization. It accesses a wide variety of transactional and operational data for performing advanced data and predictive analytics to provide meaningful insights that drive strategic business decisions.

The time required for implementing a BI solution depends on the project’s objectives, requirements, resources, and framework.

Factors that influence BI implementation time-frame

• Project objectives
• Level of customization
• Existing complexities
• Current data landscape
• Available budget
• Required team of experts
• Technologies to be deployed

Therefore, our BI implementation can take anything from a few weeks to a few months. With an incremental approach, you can choose to have priority features, tools, and functionalities configured in the first phase of your BI infrastructure development. Then, once you see results and require additional capabilities to be built in, we can help you scale your BI architecture as you go.

One of the fundamental requirements for the successful deployment of a BI solution is the cooperation of the enterprise during each stage of the project. To begin with, we need to gain an understanding of your current IT architecture and hear from all the stakeholders about the type of analytics and reporting tools they require to achieve their end goals. Then, to deliver capabilities as per the expectations of various users, we need to consult, establish and get access to the requisite data sources. Finally, we need to engage with your teams to train them to use the system efficiently.

BI implementation is a complex process that requires domain expertise. Therefore, you should partner with a BI solutions specialist experienced in delivering this architecture. PBI Analytics is a market leader in this field. We deploy Microsoft Power BI technologies for accessing, modeling, transforming, and analyzing data to create reports and visualizations that provide your company with actionable insights.

Typically, our BI implementation process involves:

• Analyzing requirements
  • Assessing business needs, user groups, volume, the complexity of data, current enterprise IT landscape, and determining the data analytics goals and security requirements.
• Building roadmap
  • Mapping the data sources and stakeholders responsible for the data required for the dashboards.
• Executing the plan
  • Developing the architecture for automating the flow of data from the sources to the BI dashboards and, depending on the project’s requirements setting up: API, ETL, data pipeline, and DWH.
• Implementing BI dashboard
  • Deploying appropriate technologies, customizing the architecture, testing performance, closing gaps, and delivering a high-quality BI dashboard.

Data security is one of the four pillars of a reliable BI system. Therefore, at PBI Analytics, we deploy Microsoft Power BI’s world-class data protection technologies to secure your data from misuse, threats, or loss. Power BI uses Azure Active Directory (ADD) to deliver data security, which includes using sensitivity labels, enforcing governance policies when data is being exported, providing user-based access, monitoring user activity on sensitive data in real-time, sending alerts, and more.

Our BI implementation services include training your teams to use the tools during the project’s final phase. After the successful deployment of the solution, if you want ongoing support for managing outages, performance issues, and any other specified services, we can establish an SLA (Service-Level Agreement) for providing helpdesk and maintenance services.

Businesses these days use multiple software and systems to function efficiently. All your business applications hold information valuable to your organization, be it ERP, HRM, CRM, production, or logistics systems. With the data being spread across multiple databases in varied formats, it becomes challenging for your enterprise to get a comprehensive view of your business performance as a whole and in detail. You need specialized data engineering services for creating the appropriate architecture for moving, assembling, preparing, and making this data available to end-users for critical functions such as data science and analytics.

Data engineering projects involve extracting, reformatting, validating, aggregating, and loading data from internal and external systems to a unified storage. In the current scenario, it also addresses the specific needs and challenges of managing big data for supporting data science activities. It essentially covers building data pipelines for the flow of data from the source systems to the defined repository in the specified format. Data pipelines can help you move both structured and unstructured data to the storage system.

1. Data storage and retrieval
2. Define and apply business rules for structuring data
3. Use ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) approach to move information to a data warehouse or a modern data warehouse
4. Use ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) approach to move information to a data lake
5. Organize and process data

Data engineering aims to simplify the process of gathering and storing data for the purpose of analysis. To accomplish this, data engineering solutions need to pull and structure data from different databases. Our proven methodologies help us build each element of an enterprise’s data engineering architecture phase-wise.

1. Identify the client’s requirements
2. Assess existing IT infrastructure
3. Evaluate and gain access to required data sources
4. Design a scalable and efficient data engineering solution
5. Implement the ETL processes to create data pipelines
6. Transfer data to enterprise data warehouse or data lake
7. Validate and verify data quality
8. Deliver a data engineering architecture that powers analytics and BI

A data pipeline is a process that automates the transfer of business information from multiple source systems to a single storage system to provide BI, data analytics, and data science functions with usable data. Data pipelines can be in batches and in real-time.

At PBI Analytics, we deploy Microsoft’s advanced technologies to build and automate data pipelines for extracting, cleaning, processing, and moving data to its targeted storage system. By expertly configuring ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) into your data architecture, we help you pull data from different applications and transform it through various steps such as combining data, sorting data, cleaning data, filtering data, and validating data to load it to your specified data storage.

Data engineering is essential for ensuring the continuous flow of data from disparate databases and sources to a single enterprise repository for providing usable information that supports efficient data analytics.

• Increased data accessibility
• Improved data integrity
• Creates a single source of truth
• Facilitates reporting, analytics, and metrics forecasting
• Drives big data analytics
• Enables better business insights

The next few years will witness technological shifts in data engineering, widening its scope and making the solutions delivered by these services more powerful, efficient, and flexible.

1. Better connectivity between data sources and the data warehouse
2. Self-service analytics with intelligent tools
3. The ability to automate data science functions
4. Hybrid data environments covering on-premises and cloud systems

Whether it is our BI or Data engineering solutions, we provide a POC upon request. A POC enables you to test a solution with basic functionalities before committing to implementing a full-fledged solution. Developing POC requires time and resources for assessing your requirements, evaluating your current IT architecture, defining the goals, developing the needed functionalities, testing, and rolling it out for validation. Hence, a POC can cost anything between X and Y depending on the solution and functionalities you want to build.