Power BI Solves the Business Continuity Problem

So first of all, what is the business continuity problem and how can Power BI help you solve it?

The business continuity problem is what happens when key spreadsheets that drive business critical reports are maintained by individual employees and then the issues that follow when those employees are out of the business. The maintenance in question might be data transformation, like getting rid of rows or columns, adding in columns, looking up data from lookup datasets, adding cleaned data to year to date datasets, summarising data, calculating metrics….all that good stuff. When those employees go on holiday/go off sick/leave the company/are hit by a runaway vehicle, those spreadsheets can grind to a halt, putting business critical reporting in jeopardy.

So how do companies normally fix this issue? Process notes is one option, but in my experience these are non existent, inadequate, incomplete, out of date, or a mixture of all four. The next option is handovers when there is advanced warning of employees leaving or going away. This is probably the most effective option, but still not great as the handovers are often lengthy and the employee who is temporarily taking over the spreadsheet updating or maintenance has no experience and often gets it wrong. And of course, if there is no advanced warning of the employee being away, handovers can’t be done either. Option 3 is have at least two people that can do every task…but headcount generally won’t allow for that. Option 4 is do nothing and the business critical reporting falls over partially or entirely.

Not good.

Power BI solves the business continuity problem by automating the data transformation and data summarisation tasks. You teach it how to do the transformations and summarisations once and then you never need to tell it again. If (or when) there’s an updated set of data that it needs to use, then just save the updated dataset over the data that Power BI’s already using and then click refresh. It doesn’t get much easier than telling someone to download a couple of datasets, save them in a particular location and then click a button.

In fact if you can schedule Excel datasets to be sent directly to mailboxes or Sharepoint sites, you can dispense with the manual saving element altogether. In this scenario just set automated refresh schedules in Power BI for whenever there will be an updated dataset. Manual updating and maintenance of spreadsheets genuinely becomes a thing of the past and along with it goes the high risk of error that comes with an inexperienced bod updating a critical spreadsheet and the lengthy handover time.

Short On Time?

What is the Business Continuity Problem?

The Business Continuity Problem is the inaccuracies, report delays, time spent in handovers and general mayhem caused when a person who maintains a business critical spreadsheet is out of the business.

In our example, a Powerpoint presentation for senior management is collated from 4 different Excel spreadsheets, maintained by 4 different people. When one of those people disappears from the business, what happens to their spreadsheet and the fate of the Powerpoint presentation?

Businesses solve this problem through a mix of process notes (inadequate, incomplete, non existent), handovers (lengthy, and errors happen anyway) or doing nothing and the reporting falling over.

How does Power BI Solve the Business Continuity Problem?

Power BI solves this problem by employees teaching Power BI how to perform the report maintenance for them. Whenever they are away and the Power BI report needs updating, their covering colleagues simply need to download the updated supporting Excel files, save them in the right place and click a refresh button. It doesn’t get much easier than that. In some cases, you can even dispense with the human intervention altogether!

Power BI can do this because it learns the data transformation steps, and remembers how to summarise data and show the graphs and charts that you want.