[MUSIC]
>> Hi, everybody. Welcome to
another Customer Power BI session at
the Microsoft Business Applications Summit.
My name is Lauren Faber,
and I am a member of the Power BI Customer Advisory Team.
I'm very excited to have Wikus with us from Standard Bank today.
Standard Bank was able to present last year at MBAS,
and I'm just very excited to be able to
see what they've achieved in just a year.
Wikus, if we could start by having you go over the agenda for
today a little bit more about
Standard Bank and what your role is at the company.
>> Hi, Lauren. Thank you for giving us the opportunity
to showcase our Power BI journey.
It's always an honor to present at MBAS.
As you've mentioned, we had
a privilege to present at last year's MBAS,
and I will only recap the start of our Power BI journey.
We'll also discuss something that we as
a team are very excited about, BI+.
Then just the next steps on how we
actually onboard our users to our environment.
My name is Wikus Kleynhans,
I'm the Power BI Platform Owner for the Standard Bank Group.
I'm responsible for Power BI,
and our BI platforms in Africa.
I've been with Standard Bank for six years now,
and I've over 10 years of experience in business intelligence.
Standard Bank is a financial institution that offers
banking and financial services to individuals,
businesses, institutions,
and corporations throughout Africa and abroad.
Standard Bank is the largest banking group of assets in Africa.
We have a rich 157 year history in South Africa,
and we started building a franchise in Sub-Saharan Africa,
almost 30 years ago now.
The ICBC is Standard Bank's biggest shareholder
with a stake of 20.1 percent.
Africa is our home,
we drive our growth.
>> Perfect. Thank you so much for that intro, Wikus.
Now, if you could go over a little bit more of
what was presented last year with the original BI challenge.
>> We had a team of only 12 members,
supporting over 20,000 users across the world.
As you can imagine, these 12 members supporting
the BI community needs to be SMEs in their fields.
Our main responsibilities are focusing on
aspects like stability, security,
licensing, research and development,
as well as expert guidance,
to ensure that the platforms perform ultimately.
We ensure that there is a solid platform strategies in place,
and to create an easy to use,
efficient, and all around pleasant experience for our users.
We spent a lot of time and effort
on the stability of our platforms,
making sure that platform is secure,
and we are sufficiently and correctly licensed.
We believe that if these three pillars aren't in place,
users won't actually make use of our platform.
We won't have time to get to the part that everybody
loves to do research and development.
We won't be able to assist our customers
with the required expert knowledge as well.
In order for us to implement our core strategies,
we actually needed to implement the following building blocks,
to ensure that Power BI's properly scaled,
it is stable, it is always available,
the right level of governance has been applied,
and the on-prem gateways are in place.
We actually covered most of this in our presentation last year,
and now only just summarize
what we're trying to show in the slide.
From the start of our Power BI journey at the end of 2017,
we did a lot of legwork upfront
to make sure that our platforms are up and running,
and that it is stable.
Some of this being to improve the monitoring,
for example, on the BI usage.
Our BI Analytics data warehouse is
something that we're very proud of,
and it provides us with insights on how each individual user,
cost center, business unit,
and country are using our platforms to ensure we plan effectively.
We can show exactly what BI assets
each user touches in our organization.
We create a lot of alerting,
even on mobile devices to know if something went wrong.
We can even kilostarts services and processes using
our mobile phones on an in-house developed app called Z app.
We focused predominantly on user adoption,
and having ensured that
a functional foundation and
clearly defined processes are in place,
it is now an easy and seamless process to
on-board new users to our platform.
At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020,
we made a conscious decision to start
focusing on the value added features available,
and the uptake has been incredible.
With a combination of a solid foundation and since a lot of BI+,
our user adoption has more than doubled
between April 2019 and April 2020.
Power BI is now used in 20 countries.
We have over 8,000 dashboards, almost 14,000 users,
two and a half thousand workspaces on the premium capacity,
and over 10,000 reports.
This has not been an overnight success,
but a gradual process to get everything in place.
>> That's really amazing to see the growth that has
been able to happen just even within a year's time.
It's neat to be able to see that you establish
that foundation and you have that in
a solid place where now you're able to
move forward and take your BI to the next level.
Earlier in the presentation you mentioned something called BI+,
and just barely you mentioned it briefly, again, as well.
What exactly does that mean, BI+?
>> Faber, so we get asked that question a lot.
What exactly is BI+?
It's a term that we coined for
every value adding feature of a BI platform.
BI+ focuses on the more modern BI techniques
that are currently available.
Many business users are only aware of
the more traditional reporting mechanisms,
and this is because they were using
traditional reporting tools until recently.
As they're on-boarded onto the more modern BI platforms,
we need to make them aware of these new features available.
Cognitive AI traditionally would have been done by group
of data scientists to build these machine learning models,
or cognitive features using Python or R. But today,
companies like Microsoft has made this part of their BI suit.
Because it has been made part of the BI suit,
users no longer require
the deep mathematical and statistical knowledge
needed to be able to implement these features.
We started masterclasses, to
train our users on using these features,
and showcasing the ease of the use of implementing
more advanced features as part of the reporting solutions,
and once they understand the value add of this
and how much better decisions they can make on their data,
that in turn drives adoption of the BI tool.
So we get a bigger increase on users of our platforms.
Everybody in today's world are concerned with AI and data science,
and this is an easy gateway to access this.
Now let's take an example of smart alerts.
Users don't have to go and look at their dashboards
everyday to see if a certain event has occurred.
It can now be triggered using Power Apps, for example,
or a feature within Power BI can check in
our alerts on their mobile devices,
when a certain event in the data happens.
We've enabled users to access the data on any smart device,
no matter where they are.
Users can also embed the reports and
other applications like SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams especially,
and I was business to effectively collaborate,
share content and what we see as developing and knowledge portal,
where business can create
a one-stop shop for all the reporting requirements.
They can host meetings,
they can share documents,
create a Wiki on required processes within a business unit,
and then, especially in today's working environment,
they've a platform where you can just say,
good morning, even when you are working as Power as a team.
You can also use NLP,
natural language processing, for example.
Users don't even have to write
one single line of code to create a dashboard.
Once a data model has been developed for
them by the technical team,
they can now create the dashboard that suits their needs,
by using the language that they're most comfortable with.
I will also show you a demo
on what I mean by this a little bit later.
Forecasting, AutoML, machine learning,
those are all new concept that business isn't aware of,
and now we are showcasing them
[inaudible] clauses by creating POCs for them.
They can see the value add.
No longer do business users have
a backwards looking view of the data,
but a forward looking view of the data.
There are a lot of additional features that we also showcase,
things like key influences, forecasting, decomposition tree,
it is all tools that are available to assist business,
to actually make better decisions,
and all of these are concepts that we have then coined, BI+.
>> That makes a lot of sense when you explain it that way,
and show that every value add that you have here, BI platform.
You also mentioned that you have prepared a demo to show us today.
Could we dive into that?
>> Yes. Basically, what we show our users,
as soon as our customers approach us,
they're normally either apprehensive to try anything new,
or they are always content on using
their current solution and not keen to move to a new platform.
What is mostly recurring theme
is business saying they aren't technically
enough to get a report themselves,
they're unfamiliar with any AI concepts,
and they won't be able to use these advanced features.
This demo will showcase for them what is possible.
They don't need to be a data scientist
to actually use these features.
As long as you understand your data,
you can build a meaningful report,
and we've deliberately made sure that
this demo is under five minutes,
to actually show them that you can build
a dashboard in less than five minutes.
Without the further ado, let's move over to that demo.
To start off, we're going to create a couple of
KPIs and then dragging the widgets to the top of the dashboard.
We build these KPIs, like I said,
by only asking our data questions and not writing any fancy code.
Firstly, we did total sales,
we drag it to the top.
Next we do the profit.
Power BI, [inaudible] it sums it for you.
Just drag it to the top.
Make it look pretty,
and then next up, I want to show the number of products.
Again, Power BI does everything for you.
You just ask it or you're just asking your data a question.
Next, I would like to see the top three salesperson.
Power BI intuitive picks up and provide
suggestions for you while you type.
>> You also have the option to create
a different visualization if you don't want
the visualization that Power BI provides for you.
But Power BI intuitive creates
a visualization that suites your data or the datatype.
Then an example of how to create
a visualization of the one that you want to show me the sales
by using a linear graph, and you can do that.
Power BI can intuitively chose that one for you.
Next we created visualization that all business uses love to see,
and that is about plotting your sales on a geo-map.
When you actually use geo-locations,
Power BI has the capability to
automatically plot it on a map for you.
We did this one by postal code,
but you can type in if you use the country name,
if use a city, if use a province.
Power BI can actually intuitively create that on
a map for you without you
plotting on where those geo-locations are.
Next up, show me all the products for each state.
Again, Power BI chooses the visualization for you.
It creates a bar chart that you can also change if you wanted to.
We move that to the right bottom corner
just to make it more visually appealing.
Everything sorted.
If you have it over these bars,
it actually pops up
a little tool tip for you with the number of products,
with the name of the states.
These tool tips are also customizable,
and actually very customizable.
That's a great feature.
Next up, we're going to actually going to start using
some additional AI features,
and apply insights to explain the fluctuations in this visual.
Again, this is all done in the background for you.
It gives you a whole list of insights into your data.
If you want to use one of these visuals,
you just click on it,
and it's added to your dashboard.
You don't have to export the data,
will ask a data scientist to develop a model
for you to analyze data.
Everything is built in and ready to use.
We can also go back to a chart that we carried earlier,
this line chart with the sales per year,
and then analyze what
the decrease for the sales between 2015 and 2016 is.
What's nice about is,
actually automatically it picks
up of this if it's an increase or decrease.
Again, it's going to do
all the hard work
in the background without you writing
any code or doing anything on your end.
Again, there's a lot of different graphs that
you can choose from if you don't like
the first one that's given to you.
You can also add the graph to your dashboard if you wanted to.
There is also the nice feature at the top,
you'll see the thumbs up, and the thumbs down.
So you can actually provide some feedback to
the Power BI program managers
on the usefulness of these visualizations.
We can add that onto the graph now to the dashboard.
So we use different types of graphs,
and the visuals that you can add to your dashboards.
So that's how easy to actually to create
one page of a dashboard on your data.
This was done in less than three minutes.
Next up, we can add some additional features.
I want to add one more page or something that I actually like
that you're going to struggle
doing on your own if you don't understand the logic behind it.
I actually want to see
all the factors that affect items being returned.
So for that, I'm going to use the key influences visualization.
First up, you select the column that you want to analyze,
and then you move fields that you think of might influence
the writing into the explain bar field.
You can use their key influence step
to assess each factor individually,
or you can click on the top segment step to see how
combination of factors affects the matrix that you're analyzing.
Lucky, so if I click on one of those bubbles,
it actually draws down into
the segment to give me an explanation of the values.
That is molding a dashboard in less than five minutes.
>> You make it look so easy.
I love that demo.
It really makes it seem
undaunting to be able to create a dashboard,
and to be able to use Power BI.
So thank you for that.
You come along way.
In a year, you have people who are starting
to really adopt Power BI.
You've been able to create this BI plus.
So you are on this really good path,
but what does that mean as next
for the journey with BI at Standard Bank.
>> Also that. Usually, after show casing this demo,
business is normally very impressed.
They want to know how did they get onto this?
How did they start using Power BI?
Then also when will these features be available?
So what's great is if you can tell them
everything that they saw is available right now.
It's available immediately.
That's usually when they get very, very excited.
They want to get stuck in straight away.
They want to know what are the next steps?
What's the cost?
Etc. Normally, what we do is we
suggest running a small master class on the data,
and then showing them what's possible.
Then we also advise them to maybe do
some self-paced online training
or registered for classroom based training.
We add them to our team site.
We got a team site that we've
also get another presentation last year.
There's a vast amounts of training material
in there, interesting articles.
We got a very active power of the AI community
of over 2,000 users,
and everything that they might need is
in there to actually start using Power BI.
We are looking at,
especially now maybe doing some more
online instructor led training by our Center of Excellence,
where we can maybe do the dashboard in a day,
dashboard in an hour, whatever.
Maybe some modeling training.
We have also the next phase in
our Power BI journey is our roll-out into the rest of Africa.
That's us in a nutshell,
and to be continued.
>> Perfect. Thank you so much.
Do you have any last things that you want to add before we end?
>> No. We appreciate all the assistance we get from you guys,
especially the program managers.
They are always open and eager to help
>> Oh, thank you. We're glad to have you here.
Thanks, Wikus.
>> Thanks, Lauren. I appreciate it.