- Power BI's mission is to help empower a new class
of data first companies,
that means helping every individual
and every team to use data to support every decision
and to do it at a scale that supports
the smallest to the largest organizations.
We have a whole raft of exciting new capabilities
and features coming to Power BI in this release wave
and I'm glad to have the opportunity
to share a few of those with you.
One of the customers we've worked with recently is Fairlife.
Founded in 2012, Fairlife is a dairy company focused
on creating better for you products
through the power of dairy nutrition.
They're originally owned by a coop of dairy farmers
and they've grown and launched numerous products
and is now owned by the Coca-Cola company.
Fairlife strives to make products that are better
for the people, for animals and for the planet
and is harnessing the power of data to achieve that mission.
Austin Bristo, senior manager of business intelligence
previously worked as a sales manager at Fairlife,
working with local Coca-Cola bottlers and their sales data.
He first used Power BI to quickly create
an integrated process for his 11 bottlers
and distributors in just a couple of weeks.
And now answers that previously took seven hours to get
are accessible almost instantly.
Since then, the Fairlife data model that Austin manages
has grown to cover supply chain and sales information
and they're adding finance, sustainability,
people and HR reporting to their model.
And that's a common trend across the industry.
Data is coming from everywhere
and customers need to integrate it quickly,
with a line of business apps generating
more digitally born data than ever before.
Fairlife adjusts the same.
Let's look at what they're doing.
They use Dynamics 365 to manage inventory
and other business processes
and users can get instant insights in Power BI.
From any table of data in any model driven application
I can click Visualize this view in just one click.
This ability won't just show up in Dynamics,
you'll see it on SharePoint lists,
Microsoft Forms, Project and many places.
And Power BI uses AI to find the columns in your data
with interesting distributions.
And it's found that some of these products
have significantly higher open orders,
particularly in this nutrition plan category.
Now, if I was interested in shipments
or how we're performing by territory,
I can sort those fields in and out.
I can also see a textual summary that Power BI's created
about the insights found in this data.
And because it's Power BI,
all of these charts are interactive
and can cross highlight or cross filter each other
To help me understand how that data breaks down.
This all got built on the fly
because of the rich dataverse connection we have
and it already understands where the data is,
how it's connected, how it's related.
So Fairlife's employees can get on with looking for insights
without worrying about plumbing all of this together.
That gives Fairlife business users a great starting point,
but as they progress
from these automatically generated reports
into Power BI desktop,
it needs to be easy for them to get started.
So we're here in Power BI desktop
and you'll see it's instantly familiar
for anybody who's used Office applications
like Outlook, Excel or PowerPoint.
The new formatting pane makes it easy
for new users to get skilled up,
make changes to the look and feel of their visuals
and to start finding insights or building beautiful reports.
Austin built this report to help senior leadership
get a high level overview of how the business is performing
and one of the key requirements was understanding
how shipments are going versus the annual plan.
And a really tricky thing to encode
in that data visualization is uncertainty or error.
In Fairlife's case, there are many places this is useful,
comparing performance to competitors in a given time period
or showing historical forecast accuracy
from a production or planning point of view.
In this case, not all of these open orders might close
in a particular month and we can turn on error bars
for these open orders and see what happens
if all of our orders close versus only half of them.
So it's easier to see the nuances in this data
and make more informed decisions based on that.
And that's the sort of thing that end users expect.
They want rich app-like experiences from their BI solutions.
So we are giving creators more flexibility
to make solutions work for them.
Another example is this slicer
that uses a new feature called report parameters.
That means authors can give users choices
to change between looking here
at inventory or profit or other measures
without having to write complex calculations
or manage lots of bookmarks.
Here we can swap or analyze shipped products versus the plan
versus variance with just one click.
Now, to build these we create a parameter
and now we can drop the fields in here
that we want users to be able to select between,
so I'll add Manager, Product Category and Territory.
Then I need to create a new slicer
and bind the field that it created into the visual.
So rather than looking here at territory,
I'll use that Slice by field.
And then as an end user, now I can see percentage variants
by manager or by category or look at the shipped units.
No end user training required, it's simpler than ever
for end users now to do whatever analysis they need
to make their data driven decisions.
The BI success story for Fairlife has really been
about getting every end user in the business looking at
and using data to make their decisions.
For example, they review raw material supply
versus production versus sales every day
to ensure they're accurately planning
to beat demand in the marketplace.
This is inherently a very collaborative process
and Microsoft Teams has been the place
where much of this happens.
Production sites have had great organic adoption,
increasing communication throughout the plants.
And when those conversations revolve around data,
Power BI brings insights right into Teams.
So I have all my chat here and over on the left hand side
I have the Power BI app.
This lets me get access to all my Power BI content
without moving away from the context of Teams.
I see recommended content and all my recent items
with access right into these reports.
And I can see on this shipment's reports
that one of the manager, Payton,
isn't on track to hit his plan for shipments.
Right from the report I could leave comments
or I could start a chat in Teams right from here.
I put the name of the person that I wanna send to
and can add a message.
I started that collaborative activity
and never left the context of Teams and the report.
And it's not just Teams,
we're integrating all over the Office platform.
For example, on office.com,
you'll be able to create Power BI reports
right here on the Create page.
And we have the Power BI application too,
just one click away without going
from the context of office.com.
Now lots of Fairlife employees spend their time in Outlook
and they still need access to data,
so we're integrating Power BI in there as well.
Just as before, the app will show up
on the left hand side, but I can do more.
I don't need to go there if I know what I'm looking for.
From within an email I can say,
Hey, I know the work report I want to share
and search for it from in here.
It'll show me recently used reports so I can choose the one
and drop my shipment's report right here into the email.
Now, when Alex gets this email,
he can open it here in context in Outlook
or even subscribe directly to the email.
So it'll get delivered to him every day
right into his inbox.
So that's three places, Teams, office.com and Outlook,
where anyone in a company can get access to the data
from the tools they use every day to collaborate
and communicate and make data driven decisions.
The other part of rolling out
a successful Power BI implementation like Fairlife have done
is making sure that everyone
can discover the data they need.
I'm in the Power BI service here
and the Power BI data hub is helping Fairlife's employees
as it's a one stop shop for discovering all of their data.
First and foremost, it gives me recommendations
on data sets I might need,
either ones that I've used recently
or ones that my colleagues use
based on information from the office graph.
I can see that these ones beneath are certified
or promoted data sets.
That means I know that they are trustworthy,
well managed sources of data for me to use.
And coming in this release wave,
I can even discover data sources I don't yet have access to
if the owner has decided to let me see them.
I can request permission if I want to get access
to the underlying data and by default it would start
an approval process with the data set owner.
But here, Fairlife has customized a set of instructions
that they want their employees to follow.
They need to provide justification, take some training
and then they'll be given access.
When I click into this, Power BI shows some information
about the data set.
There's a description,
it tells me when the data was last refreshed,
I can even see the tables and columns available within it.
No more guessing as to what data's contained here.
Users can see what's there without having to go
and build a report on top of it.
First at the bottom, I can see the reports
that have already been created on top of this data set
and that might save me a step if other people
have already built the analysis I'm looking for.
I can see how many viewers and views there have been, too.
This one of the bottom looks like lots of folks
are using it, so that might be a great place
for me to start.
I can create a copy of the report to build from
if I want to customize it or build on it further.
Another way that Power BI saves me time
is that the data set owner can create template reports
that gives me a starting point,
perhaps with a page that explains what the data shows
or with some common filters or visuals
that are often used against this data.
I can even have Power BI automatically generate a report
against this data just as we saw earlier
against the table in Dynamics.
And that really helps users discover the data sources
that are available to them,
get started building their own reports
and ultimately find insights to help them make decisions.
Let's recap.
Coming in this release wave, you'll see the ability
for Power BI to automatically create reports from Dynamics,
Project, SharePoint and more,
basically anywhere you see tables of data
to help you find insights and get started quickly.
And when you build reports,
you'll see error bars and report parameters
and much more to create rich data driven applications
to help your end users find their own insights.
And to help empower everyone across your whole organization,
we're bringing data deeply into Microsoft Teams,
the Office hub and Outlook to bring data and insight
to the communication and collaboration tools
where you and your colleagues spend their time.
And finally, to help everybody find the data they need.
The Power BI data hub helps you discover, access
and build on top of trusted, accurate data
to make the right data driven decisions for your business.