Many companies are currently considering switching from Qlik to Power BI, as QlikView is soon to be replaced by Qlik Sense. With a product change in the pipeline, a complete overhaul of reporting may also be in order: The Qlik reporting solution may be at the end of its useful life and no longer meets the organization’s needs for knowledge management. A company may have identified new reporting needs or the need to create a data warehouse to serve future reporting. An additional motivation for a possible Power BI implementation is the good experience heard from others in the industry about the implementation and use of Power BI.
The popularity of Power BI and the benefits of the Microsoft ecosystem
Qlik Sense and Power BI are similar in technical capabilities, although the philosophy of the products is slightly different. Both products are being actively developed, and thanks to the constant comparison between them, similar functionalities are being added to both products one by one.
Another big selling point is Power BI’s flexible licensing model, which is cheaper per user than Qlik. Microsoft’s licensing model also benefits those organizations that already have other Microsoft products in place. In addition, Power BI integrates easily with other Microsoft products, and working within the same ecosystem is easy and seamless, and the collaboration features that they provide are an added advantage over other reporting tools.
Microsoft also offers comprehensive support and training services for the use of Power BI, either in-house or through its training partners, and Pinja offers Power BI courses.
In the Gartner Magic Quadrat, Microsoft Power BI is the innovation leader in business intelligence products and also ranks well in the comparison of data integration products.
Building a data warehouse reporting solution takes time
The Qlik reporting solution may have been built without a proper data warehouse. In this case in particular, the benefits of a data warehouse that collects all the company data can open up a discussion about changing the reporting system.
If the company decides to build a data warehouse when replacing the product, it is an investment in the future: The reporting solution will become more time-efficient, easier to expand, and the company will not find itself in a supplier trap.
The implementation of Power BI reporting, built on a data warehouse, is facilitated by Pinja’s service concept, which has proven to be an effective way to get modernized reporting into the organization. After the initial project, the data warehouse can be grown and developed in the desired direction.
The data warehouse uses an SQL database that can also be used elsewhere in the company, for example as an integration platform. SQL databases make it easy to combine forecasting and machine learning with data, for example, it is easy to create and store forecasts and make them easily accessible. The data warehouse can be based on a cloud solution, available to all systems that need it, but can also be located on-premises, on a physical server if data security requires it.
Power BI’s cloud-based reporting solution is easy to develop and maintain. All these benefits make it a good option for an organization to manage the whole knowledge management palette – it is easy to aggregate and combine data into a data warehouse, the data warehouse grows as needed, and AI and machine learning can be built into it. You can read more about using machine learning to improve forecast accuracy here.
Pinja and replacing the reporting system
Our experts are involved from start to finish in the replacement and development of the reporting system. Pinja’s solid experience in data warehouses, migrating data from an old reporting solution to a new one and data conversion makes the implementation of a new system easy. The organization’s historical data has the flexibility readily available in the new reporting system, and the new system is fast and does not overload or slow down due to the data warehouse supporting the calculation.
Read more on a successful reporting system replacement: Unico replaced its reporting solution with the help of Pinja.
A data warehouse pays for itself in reporting efficiency: Reports will be easier to maintain and more reliable, and the reporting solution grows with your business. The creation of a data warehouse prepares you for future reporting challenges, harmonizes the data to be stored and the methods used to collect it, and brings the reporting that the company needs up to date.
Read more
Knowledge management and business intelligence at Pinja
A summary on why a data warehouse is such an important part of knowledge management
A data warehouse helps you move from searching for information to working with information
Unico's success story
Machine learning significantly improves the accuracy of business forecasts
