How Microsoft Power BI Has Proven To Be Invaluable

Guest Blog by Matt Riley – Complete I.T.

The challenge for most businesses is transforming data into useable information. Throughout the years, Complete I.T. has used a number of tools to try and make sense of the data that we hold and have found Microsoft Power BI to be the most insightful, effective and easiest to understand.

Complete I.T. decided to invest in the Microsoft Power BI platform for a variety of reasons:

• With Power BI you can pull data from various sources, including our CRM, our helpdesk feedback system and Microsoft Excel
• The solution is scalable through our Microsoft 365 licensing
• The reports and dashboards you create within Power BI are visually pleasing and easy to understand – they can also be displayed on dashboards in our offices.

How has Microsoft Power BI been a success for Complete I.T.?

Using our helpdesk team and ConnectWise as an example, Power BI has been especially helpful when it comes to our helpdesk tickets within ConnectWise.

To give you some context, Complete I.T. typically closes between seven and eight thousand helpdesk tickets each month and this does not include all of those logged/dealt with by our automated systems.  Picture that as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet – 8000 lines each with 20-30 columns of data; that’s 240,000 pieces of data in one month alone!

In order to gain actionable insights from this huge amount of data, it needs to be developed into information that can then be used. Firstly, time was spent with our National Helpdesk Manager to understand what he would find useful in his day-to-day role.

Within our ConnectWise system we have a record of every helpdesk ticket raised and each record has a date and time.

Taking all of this data into account we wanted to understand the following:

1. The demand for the Complete I.T. helpdesk service over the year
2. What days have the most demand on the Complete I.T. helpdesk
3. The time of day that the Complete I.T. helpdesk receive the most amount of calls

We found out the following about the helpdesk:

1. Our helpdesk team are quieter in the summer and in December so we could encourage the team to take annual leave during these periods and we could also bring in additional team members to cover busy periods.
2. The beginning of the week is the busiest, with Friday being the quietest day, therefore we could frontload any part-time team members towards the beginning of the week and encourage them to take leave toward the end of the week.
3. The beginning of the day is the busiest, with the afternoon being a lot quieter. We could therefore plan our shift patterns so that we have more people in the morning and less in the afternoon and encourage those members of the team who want to take a half day, to do so in the afternoon.

Using Power BI empowers us to turn a huge amount of data into useful information which we can learn from and make business decisions which can improve processes and the way we work to help us better support our clients.

• If you are interested in learning more about Power BI, visit our webpage for more information.
• If you would like to speak to a member of our team, get in touch today.