Analytics for Operations and Logistics Management Case Study

Part 1

Table 1: Key performance indicator

Figure 1: Pie chart of the KPI variables

Part 2

1. Introduction

In the present phase of technological advancements, logistics companies are implementing various innovative business processes, strategies, and technologies to deliver services effectively and efficiently. Logi Services is one of the logistics enterprises that support SME organizations by providing them with logistics services. The organization is facing issues with technological knowledge and the employees of the organization lack digital literacy. This is one of the issues that is stated in the report. With the use of Power BI, the organization will be able to approach the solution to the issues. In the present report, a dashboard has been created and illustrated that illustrated key performance indicators for the business. Features of Power Bi and its proposed benefit are also discussed in the report. A reflection of the learning of the report is also described in the president's task.

2. Description of Power Bi features

• Interface: Power BI Desktop incorporates industry-standard Microsoft technologies for querying, modeling, and visualizing data. Data scientists and others may quickly compile and distribute sets of searches, data access, models, and reports. Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service work together to make it simpler to model, produce, share, and expand data-driven discoveries (Becker and Gould, 2019). Without Power BI Desktop, the process of building and developing data analysis repositories and reports may be disjointed, complicated, and time-consuming.
• Workflow: The primary stage in a typical Power BI procedure is to create an account by connecting to pertinent datasets in Power BI Desktop. Once the organization is satisfied with the report, organization can publish it to the Power BI service and make it available to business customers in the Power BI service and on mobile devices (Collier, 2023). The workflow features of Power Bi allow to the creation of multiple tables and the data sets included in the table can be shaped and transformed as per the needs of the organizations. On the other hand, the features also help in developing interconnections between the created tables. This allows enterprises to create mixed datasets from multiple data and information (Deckler, 2019). The use of a calculated table in a data flow makes it possible to conduct write-only activities on top of a referenced linked table. A new table has been created as a part of the workflow as a consequence.
• Query location: The platform’s Query environment is a potent tool for searching, connecting, and implementing statistics from a large diversity of sources. In addition, it reformats the input data into a form suitable for visualization. Statistics may be identified, loaded, and distorted without assistance from the tool (Knight et al., 2020). The feature is also known as the self-service ETL tool Power Query's biggest benefit is that it saves users from having to repeatedly execute the same data-processing activities over and over again. With the feature, an individual can keep track of all the ETL stages the system has run as query steps. The query environment features allow an individual to redo any process by revisiting the query step in question and clicking "Refresh."

3. Identification of concepts

Unlike traditional dimensions, which are built from feature columns in dimension tables, fact dimensions are built from feature columns in fact data. If the enterprise want to avoid duplicating information, stakeholders may save useful dimensional data in a fact table (Clark, 2020). The specific rule of the facts and dimension table is that each element in the fact table should map to equivalent elements in the dimension tables. furthermore, a fact table is necessary for each board in a multilevel record that uses a compound input. Every table in a volumetric folder that represents a many-to-many correlation is a fact table.

Figure 2: Relationship between fact and dimension table

Creation IDs, occasion Codes, purchaser IDs, and District Codes are all main keys in the dimensional tables, while their equivalent fields in the fact table are identifiers. A main (compound) key for the fact board is a union of these four distant variables. A “rule of thumb” is that each distant key in the fact table is supposed to map to an equivalent field in the dimension table.

4. Analysis of KPI in designing dashboard

The dashboard in part 1 showcases the key performance indicators such as customer segment, product category, and shipping cost. The customer segment is the number of customers from different segments and regions including different organizations in the retail industry and the offline vendors and suppliers. The Product category refers to the varieties of products and services offered by the organization. The shipping cost indicates the charges and the price of delivering the product to the customers and the distribution unit of different organizations. The Power Bi can be used with the KPI by integrating the key performance indicators with Power Bi. By integrating both the processes the performance indicator can be analyzed and monitored and required changes in the performance of the organization can be implemented by the senior leaders of the enterprise (Salvadorinho et al., 2020). When businesses use BI, they are able to get relevant data to the people who need it the most, speeding up the discovery process and facilitating better choices. This leads to better teamwork, more transparency throughout the company, and quicker decision-making. By analyzing the key performance indicator the organization will be able to analyze massive amounts of data that are required in enacting changes in the operational process of the organization. Identifying flaws and errors in the KPIs will allow the organization to implement training sessions for the employees and other stakeholders to develop their skills and expertise.

5. Benefits of Power Bi

Power BI's many benefits include facilitating swift decision-making by management without compromising the bottom line. Power BI makes it easy to create visually appealing data. It provides a visual overview of all relevant corporate data in a variety of formats including tables, charts, gauges, and maps to facilitate its usage by teams. Power BI, with its emphasis on simplicity and visual representation, is an effective decision-support tool that can transform a conventional business into one with superior productivity, responsiveness, and adaptability. Power BI's strength lies in the fact that it can be used effectively by both professional and non-technical analysts of the organization because of its user-friendly interface (Zadeh et al., 2020). The intuitive drag-and-drop interface eliminates the need for coding expertise when answering difficult data-related inquiries. These complex analytics, which includes implications, regressions, and statistical summaries, are made more accessible to users because of the system's ease of use.

Power BI has several reporting options that facilitate the development of polished, interactive dashboards. It also supports a broad variety of data sources and may assist in the development of robust data models. So, these dashboards may be augmented with data from all throughout the company's apps.

These dashboards are quite helpful in facilitating the consolidation of strategic initiatives, the identification of key insights, and the acceleration of enterprise-wide decision-making. Training a large number of users to develop such dashboards may greatly accelerate the process of becoming a data-driven organization by making its insights freely available to all employees. Users of Power BI may create a visual narrative out of a collection of visualizations (including dashboards) that explains the relationship between data insights, context, and consequences. Power BI is superior to other tools like Excel because of its ability to combine complex graphics into a logical data store (Russo and Ferrari, 2019). In line with the overarching purpose of business intelligence, these data tables excel at presenting a persuasive argument for conveying actionable insights to decision-makers.

Real-time data pushes and streams mean that the dashboard is always up-to-date, providing the most recent data and information for the fastest possible problem-solving, opportunity-spotting, and efficient management of time-sensitive data. One of the many advantages of using Power BI is that it allows users to create a dashboard that is tailored to their specific business requirements by simply dragging and dropping elements. The benefits of using the Power BI dashboard are almost endless because of the many options for creating effective models and visualizations. The benefits of Microsoft Power BI might make it the best option for any company, regardless of size, that needs better reporting and analysis. In analyzing and interpreting data and information it is essential for the business to have security options and processes in data interpretation. Power Bi helps Logi services to develop customized security options thus helping in mitigating the issues and risk of the data breach (Coroban and Gavrila, 2019). The tool provides self-service access that allows employees and staff to analyze and interpret the information individually. No additional units or departments are required for accessing the Power Bi tool thus helping with time consumption. In addition, it makes use of user-friendly visual design tools and can communicate with users in a natural language interface. With the drag-and-drop feature, dashboards may be made with little effort. All of these features make Power BI easy to use, even for those who aren't computer savvy. Employees can be trained with the tool easily which will help in advancing the technical knowledge of the employees and staff.

Business around the world has been changing since the globalisation and new perspectives and models of analysing a business are getting entry into the system. A business intelligence platform constitutes a type of platform that provides the service of analysing business information and data with clarity (Amarasinghe et al., 2020). Power Bi can be considered a business intelligence platform that usually operates on any device, namely mobile phones, desktops, and laptops, and provides holistic knowledge about one's business conditions. One of the significances of Power Bi is that the platform provides the management of a business or the external stakeholders a clear picture of the condition of the business from which they are enabled to decide on plans with ease (Selvan, and Balasundaram, 2021).

Figure 3: Benefits of Power Bi

6. Conclusion

The report here covers the usage and importance of the business intelligence tool, especially the software named Power Bi. Power Bi has been used to conceptualise data and information for extracting holistic results by which the internal and external stakeholders are addressed. The decision-making process of a business becomes easy with the concrete available data. The report provides emphasis on the functioning of the software, and on the context of various KPIs and a dashboard has been provided as well. The KPIs in concern are all described with an emphasis in this report for a better understanding of the function of the software, Power Bi (Wade, 2020). A section in the report discusses in detail the benefits of the new software and its implications for business functioning. It has been found that the software has successfully and skillfully omitted the possibility of data and logistic challenges with efficiency. The report has aimed to understand the approach to adopting business intelligence tools in the business sphere. It has been successful to understand the aim with logical reasoning as traced in the whole report. The report will also outline a reflective study by deploying a theoretical model as attached below by considering the experiences of the shareholders of a business, for instance, employees and management.

7. Gibbs Reflective study

Gibb's reflective model or framework is a type of reflective writing and is also considered to be academic. In this reflective study, emphasis is made on six factors, namely the description that describes the incident, feelings of the stakeholders regarding the incident, evaluation of the happening, analysis with a critical approach, conclusion summing up the whole study, and lastly an action plan that provides a vision for the future.

Figure 4: Gibbs Reflective Model

• Description: The introduction of a business intelligence platform or tool in Logi Service, a company that provides logistic services to small and medium businesses in the UK. I got to know the initiation of the tool, specifically the tool named Power Bi to digitalise its operations and business processes. While going to analyse I also learned that the company used a few KPIs to prepare a dashboard. The KPIs data I used to analyse the results here are the customer segment, product category, shipping costs, and many more (Ain et al., 2019). I also learned the benefits of Power Bi and realised its practical implication in the business field. I got to realise the issue and prevalence of technological illiteracy among the employees who are not trained properly in this matter.
• Feelings: I realised that for a business to be successful and sincere, even if it serves the SME organisation, it requires a set of skills that will benefit the process. I felt that for engaging in a logistics service I had a set of skills, for instance, providing services, technological literacy, product categorisation, and others. However, after the introduction of the business intelligence platform of Power Bi, I realised that technological literacy is required to be sharpened to a greater extent.
• Evaluation: The experience with the initiation of the Power Bi tool in the Logi Service questioned the skillfulness of its employees, as many are not much adapted to the usage of technology (Richards et al., 2019). While undertaking the evaluation section I got to understand the importance of intelligence tools or platforms in the discipline of data analytics that in turn serves to better an organisation. Throughout this process, I realised my knowledge about data analytics and how far I can use technology such as Power Bi.
• Analysis: I learned that the Power Bi tool enables the shareholder to understand the internal situation of the business with more clarity. I got to learn the process of analysing spreadsheets more quickly. I also got to prepare log sheets by using the tool for greater visualisation. Previously I did not know visualising the financial or accounting data of a business but after understanding Power Bi I got to know the process of the same. I also learned how to categorise KPIs and how to systematically forge them to prepare a dashboard for better understanding.

Conclusion

I realised that the introduction of the business intelligence tool in a functioning business will be beneficial for them. As the tool analyses the data and categorises them into a systematic format, I learned how important it is to present clean and systematic data for the better functioning of a business. In this process of analysis, I understood that raw data is not used in the analytical process, and skills like handling these technological tools are required. The most significant skill I learned from the Power Bi tool, is to visualise the raw data into something concrete.

Action Plan

Skills to develop	Estimated Duration	Status	Requirements	Budget
1) To know how to use SQL	1) Six months	1) Learning	1) Help from professors, and tutorials.	1) As required.
2) To know Cognitive Data Analytics	2) One year	2) Learning	2) Help from online courses, and professors.	2) As required
3) To learn Predictive Data Analytics	3) One year	3) Yet to start	3) Help from professors, peers, and books.	3) As required
4) Improve dashboard preparation	4) Four months	4) Learning	5) Help from peers, books, and self-practice	5) As required

References

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Russo, M. and Ferrari, A., 2019. The Definitive Guide to DAX: Business intelligence for Microsoft Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Excel. Microsoft Press.

Salvadorinho, J., Teixeira, L. and Sousa Santos, B., 2020, July. Storytelling with Data in the Context of Industry 4.0: A Power BI-Based Case Study on the Shop Floor. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 641-651). Springer, Cham.

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