Power BI – What's in it for you? - A business interview

Dennis: Many years ago I started to work for DSM Food Specialties, a business group of DSM . Initially as an Excel consultant, but the introduction of PowerBI turned it's BI landscape completely upside down. To my surprise, the following text landed in my mail box today and it was an interview about the adoption of Power BI in DFS and one of the reports I designed for them. Fei and Jacques, I thank you for this interview and all opportunities DSM gave me.

An Interview with Jacques Verdier, global supply chain director at DSM Food Specialties. Article by Fei Wang.

“Power BI has proved to be essential in mobilizing ourselves as a team, also cross-functionally. It is absolutely critical to all the elements in Aspire to Lead.”

It’s not a secret that Power BI has become one of the most beloved tools within DFS in quite a short period of time. More and more people from DFS are discovering the tool and willing to accept the power that Power BI has to offer in turning data into rich insights and opportunities – driving better business decisions across the organization.

We reached out to one of the early adopters of Power BI within DFS, none other than Jacques Verdier (Global Supply Chain Director DFS), to get a glimpse of his perspectives on the tool:

-Hi Jacques, congratulations and thank you for being one of the first to embrace Power BI within DFS. Can you fill us in with your thoughts on the tool?

Jacques: Thank you, I am delighted to be recognized in this fashion. However, it is more important to acknowledge what Power BI has brought us. Take for example the Planning and Scheduling Adherence Dashboard, it is saving us a lot of time in calculating and validating the Planning and Scheduling KPIs. Nowadays, we do not need to manually calculate those KPIs anymore, but simply plug in the data and its automatically calculated in Power BI. Other than saving time, this user friendly tool has accommodated us with valuable insights, by transforming our data into rich visuals. It has brought our data to life! It has without a doubt increased the data driven culture within DFS, as well as greatly improved the efficiency in how we track our targets and costs. It is truly a great tool! I recall that I made a bold statement at the beginning of 2019, saying that Power BI was the best thing that happened to us in 2018. And I’m glad to look back to see that Power BI proved itself to be absolutely essential to the successful delivery of CORNAS in 2019!

-Good to hear that you are fully utilizing and enjoying Power BI! In what ways does it assist you in your work?

Jacques: At Supply Chain, we put strong emphasis on what our data is telling us. I strongly believe that the only way to make progress is to understand the issues and to locate where the opportunities for improvements lie. Power BI helps us with our analyses, it enables us to make informed, and well thought through decisions by allowing us (the users) to customize and personalize the visuals. We are able to view data by various dimensions and attributes, fitting to our own wishes and needs, thus providing us with the specific information that we are looking for. At the same time, spotting and analyzing with Power BI is very easy, especially with the time intelligence feature, it only takes seconds to view vast amounts of data. I am very pleased with the self-service aspect of the tool! Another critical aspect that I very much like is the try-out-and-fail-fast opportunity that Power BI offers, avoiding long discussions on definitions and functional specifications. And not to forget, credits to the very agile support team for reacting very quickly to requests for improvements, often executing it within 24 hours. Completely unheard of in anything I have seen so far in my career!

Because of all this, Power BI has proved to be essential in mobilizing ourselves as a team, also cross-functionally. It is absolutely critical to all the elements in Aspire to Lead. As we have noticed, and rightly so, Data (Power BI) is right in the middle of the Aspire to Lead Triangles.

-That’s great! Would you recommend Power BI to your colleagues?

Jacques: For sure! I would recommend Power BI to everyone at DFS and even DSM wide. Not only to process owners and managers, but to EVERYONE! Just start using it if you aren’t already! It is a pity to still see people not making use of some of our very relevant reports in their daily work. By having a strong user community, we can generate more feedback and further improve the visuals and user friendliness of our reports. I can’t stress enough that Power BI gives life to our data and presents it in an easy to understand way, which in turn provides us with rich insights and opportunities, ultimately helping us make informed and better calculated decisions. With the self-service abilities, we are no longer dependent on others for transforming and analyzing data, we’ve got the power in our own hands. I would love to see others benefit from this tool as well!

A very special thanks to Jacques for this insightful interview. Make sure to also experience the Power BI from within! 

(https://www.depict-it.nl/2020/02/05/power-bi-whats-in-it-for-you/)