Power BI Reporting: Building Resilience for Growth in 2022

Sustained growth requires resilience. If companies want to maintain consistent growth, they need to survive the unexpected. Whether it is a labor shortage or a supply chain disruption, organizations must have the flexibility to pivot resources to counter unexpected change. This institutional resilience requires more than ample cash reserves or a business continuity plan. It needs an in-depth assessment of the following areas:

• Finance
• Operations
• Technology
• Culture

Sustained growth means building resilience in each area. If a company cannot bounce back from an unexpected event, it cannot sustain growth. And sustained growth requires Power BI Reporting to ensure information is readily available.

Financial Resilience?

Many organizations see resiliency in terms of financial resilience. Do they have the financial resources to compensate for an economic downturn? Does the business have resources to hire personnel at a competitive rate? Are there resources in place to survive a natural disaster? Answering these questions may have ensured sustainability in the past, but today's companies need to look at a broader scope.

The 21st-century world is a connected one. What happens in one part of the world can impact companies everywhere. When countries close their borders, people and products stall. Suddenly, an employee living in Canada cannot get to work in the US, or a part can no longer be imported to build needed equipment. 

Organizations must consider the following factors when looking at financial resilience:

• Geopolitical Concerns. Companies must now look at the political atmosphere in different parts of the world, regardless of whether they conduct business in those locations. Unrest in one part of the world could slow the production of critical components or make them difficult to transport.
• Macroeconomics. The world's financial position has a more significant impact on individual countries than ever before. Changes in stock markets are transmitted in milliseconds. Labor strikes or an unstable housing market can disrupt financial markets worldwide.
• Climate Change. Scientists predict that severe weather will become more frequent and more intense. With more natural disasters such as floods or wildfires likely, companies need strategies to help sustain growth as the world's climate changes.

Corporations need to consider how to counter global events that have a negative economic impact.

Operational Resilience with Power BI Reporting

According to McKinsey research, companies experience at least 30 days of operational disruption every 3.7 years. These disruptions result in a loss of 45% of one year's income in a decade. Much of this loss comes from a lack of resilience in supply chain operations. Specifically, companies need to collect data on the following:

• Supply chain. Organizations need a diversified supply chain that ensures a consistent flow of supplies. Companies need access to historical and existing data to assess performance.
• Global assets. International corporations with worldwide assets need better insight into the viability of those assets over time.
• Digital operations. Technology must be at the operational core to sustain consistent growth. Ensuring that technology is implemented with maximum agility means a faster pivot when unexpected change occurs.
• Cross-functional flexibility. Whether it is a long- or short-term labor shortage, businesses need to use internal resources effectively. Operations personnel must be cross-trained to allow reallocation of human resources.

Data is essential to understanding how well operations are functioning. Having real-time data is critical to sustained growth. Making sure that the right data is in the right hands at the right time enables managers to make data-driven decisions that build resiliency and sustain growth. Using tools such as Power BI can help ensure that happens.

Technological Resilience

If companies want sustained growth, they must build technological resilience. As the world becomes more technology-dependent, the ramifications of a system failure become more widespread. Gartner's Rozeman and Blair found that 76% of survey respondents experienced a system failure during a two-year period. The cost for an hour of downtime averaged $300,000 for 88% of those surveyed.

To address technical redundancy, organizations need to focus on the critical path of a customer's journey and then collect data to determine the most likely points of failure. From the data, IT departments can create system resilience to shift resources as needed to ensure maximum uptime. This effort requires technical data as well as business intelligence.

Cultural Resilience

Every company has a culture. The question is whether it was created purposefully or just happened. For a culture to be resilient, it must be purposeful. As more employees continue to work remotely, maintaining a resilient culture requires a sustained effort. In an interview, McKinsey's Brooke Weddle stated that healthy cultures had a three times greater total shareholder return than those with a less healthy work environment. According to Weddle, 70% of digital transformations fail because of culture-related issues.

Central to a healthy culture is transparency. Sharing data goes a long way to establishing transparency and building trust. If businesses want to experience sustained growth, they need to create an environment built on trust. Sometimes, the effort involved in sharing data gets in the way. It takes too much time and relies on faulty human memories to ensure consistent distribution. With a scheduler, reports can be created and distributed without human involvement.

Sustained Growth

It's easy to say that organizations need resiliency to achieve sustained growth. It's a totally different effort to accomplish it. Resiliency requires more than a business continuity plan covering the logistics of business survival. Continuity plans are designed as a stop-gap measure to keep a company operational until the situation returns to normal.

Being resilient means adapting to changing circumstances with no expectation of returning to the pre-change environment. For businesses to be resilient, they must pivot as needed to maintain a path towards sustained growth. However, they must rely on data to make decisions to ensure a resilient enterprise well-positioned for growth.

One way businesses are being resilient is by adopting tools that allow them to focus on innovation. One such tool is Power BI Scheduler (PBRS) by ChristianSteven Software. Delivery of needed data is automated so that it gets delivered to each team member on time and in the form required. Contact us to learn how easily your team can increase efficiency and receive data for growth.

PBRS (Power BI Reports Scheduler) is a product by a third-party vendor - ChristianSteven Software. It is used for automating the scheduling and distribution of reports and dashboards. You can download a 30-day trial at the PBRS product page at the ChristianSteven website.

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