With the cost of BI sharply increasing…10 years on has it made field leaders more productive?

Power BI is celebrating its 10-year anniversary by increasing its pricing 40% next year per a release last week.

In just a decade, it is staggering how omnipresent Business Intelligence (BI) technology has become, and Power BI has taken the largest market share of any BI platform (>30%), to become a $2bn business and the core source of reports for most enterprises today.

However, the anniversary and the price increase is a timely point to ask the question: has the proliferation of BI actually helped make field leaders more productive or less?

Walk a store with any field leader and they’ll raise a common complaint. The amount of information they receive today has exploded over the last 10-years as cloud reporting has become available. And it is completely overwhelming.

An average manager receives over 54,000 datapoints a week. We’ve spoken to managers who have access to over 20,000 report slices.

How can we pretend they have the capacity or analytical capability to review all of them and know what actions to take?

The result is hours burned in back offices, confusion around what actions to take, and managers swamped in a complex web of reports and systems.

The average store manager spends over 15% of their time analyzing reports and logging in and out of different systems. Above the store, one retailer we spoke to expected their district and regional managers to be spending 50% of their time with customers and colleagues. When they measured it with a time in motion study, it was closer to 20%.

Productivity has hardly moved at the same time as data and reporting has become ubiquitous.

Made for the knowledge worker not the field worker.

PowerBI is a fantastic tool for the knowledge worker who has hours to spend analyzing and interpreting data, conducting ‘exploratory’ analysis.

It’s not a tool, however, designed for the time-poor field user.

We think an alternative is needed. 

Instead of giving access to a firehose of data, give people personalized insights of what will drive most value from their actions.

Instead of stopping with a table or dashboard, give them guided workflows and training of what the next best action might be.

Instead of just pushing information from the center out, gather crowd-sourced feedback from stores to give richer central insights on what is actually driving performance.

Quorso has been helping managers across over 50,000 stores move to a more intelligent way of managing using Co-Pilots that assist and augment their daily work. Helping retail managers drive the most strategic KPIs in less time.