Scenario Planning and Write-Back in Power BI with Power ON
This Expert Insights interview features Power ON, a provider of self-service business intelligence software built on Microsoft’s Power Platform. Power ON extends Power BI with real-time write-back and collaboration tools for planning, variance analysis, forecasting, budgeting, and workflows. Where Power BI is traditionally a read-only platform that ingests and presents data, Power ON adds a two-way capability: users can input data directly in Power BI and write it back to the data model.
Jon Thompson hosts Vice Presidents Eric Weiss and Mike Marotta. Founded in 2015, Power ON has 50 employees across the globe and serves over 20 Fortune 100 customers. As a disclosure, Blue Margin receives revenue from Power ON when reselling their services.
Watch the full interview on YouTube, listen to the podcast on Spotify, or read the highlights below.
Scenario Planning and Forecasting in Power BI
If business isn’t about being able to see what’s happening and make adjustments, I don’t know what it is.
Jon Thompson, CEO, Blue Margin
Companies that stay ahead in uncertain conditions do so because they have reliable instrumentation for testing assumptions before they commit to a course of action. What if inflation slows consumer buying power and reduces product demand? What if credit tightening limits access to capital for planned investments? Executives need real numbers specific to their own companies to answer those questions, not generalized market commentary.
alt=”Power ON scenario planning visualization in Power BI showing the impact of different business assumptions on the bottom line” />
Good data beats an opinion any day of the week.
Eric Weiss, Vice President, Power ON
Power ON’s scenario planning and forecasting tools let users visualize multiple scenarios and their projected impact on the bottom line directly inside Power BI. Those scenarios can be saved and shared with teammates for real-time collaboration, turning what would otherwise be a static forecast into a live planning environment.
Power ON allows users to run scenarios in a typically read-only platform. They can begin to ask questions, interact with visuals, play with different drivers to understand the effect or outcome of various situations they might come across.
Mike Marotta, Vice President, Power ON
Why Data Quality Has to Be a Leadership Priority
If you’re a leader in your organization, you need to put a priority on data quality because it has such an impact on decision making.
Eric Weiss, Vice President, Power ON
Executives rely on real-time access to quality data to make decisions and set priorities. For organizations still working from disconnected spreadsheets and manual exports, the cost of that approach shows up not just in slow decisions but in the leadership time spent reconciling conflicting reports before anyone can act. A managed data foundation eliminates that reconciliation work by ensuring everyone is pulling from the same validated source.
Eric and Mike both emphasize continued education as part of staying competitive with data. Building a data-driven culture means keeping up with how tools are evolving and relying on outside expertise to fill in the gaps rather than trying to develop every capability internally.
Single-Screen Reporting as a Decision-Making Accelerator
The disruptive aspect of single-screen reporting is that it dramatically saves time by consolidating collection and reporting. It really has a huge impact on the velocity of decision making.
Eric Weiss, Vice President, Power ON
When every department is working from a different report, decisions slow down and alignment breaks. Single-screen reporting consolidates the highest-impact metrics into one view and gets every stakeholder working from the same data. The time saved on data collection and manual spreadsheet maintenance is significant, but the larger impact is on the speed and quality of decisions. This is why how a dashboard is designed matters as much as the data behind it: a cluttered single screen is no better than the spreadsheets it replaced.
Leveraging Excel Familiarity to Lower the Barrier to Data Intelligence
What we love about the Power ON tool is the ability to use it to develop a Master Scorecard without all the overhead of connecting to the various transactional systems, modeling the data, setting up the transforms, doing the logic, etc.
Jon Thompson, CEO, Blue Margin
Excel fluency is one of the most common skills in any business, and Power ON uses that familiarity as an on-ramp to data intelligence. Power ON’s Power XL tool lets users write back information directly to their reporting database from within Power BI using Excel formulas, with no need for Visual Basic or other programming knowledge. Users can input metrics, KPIs, thresholds, and tracking parameters in a language they already know.
Many users when they start using Power BI have to learn a new formulaic language (DAX), but Power ON uses Excel language, which is a massive time saver for users.
Mike Marotta, Vice President, Power ON
For teams still managing performance tracking in Excel who are evaluating a move to Power BI, Power ON’s write-back capability shortens the transition significantly. Users can contribute to the data model without changing the interface they already work in every day.
Contact Power ON
To explore how Power ON can extend what your team gets from Power BI, reach out to Mike or Eric on LinkedIn or visit poweronbi.com.
About Blue Margin
Blue Margin helps private equity and mid-market companies convert data into automated dashboards quickly, the most efficient path to building a data-driven culture and accountability to a growth plan. We call it The Dashboard Effect, which is also the name of our book and podcast. If you would like to explore how Blue Margin can move your organization beyond manual reporting, contact us here.
