Are you a Language Service Provider? Do you use a Translation Management System (TMS), or another ERP, to manage your projects, vendors, employees or finance? And how often have you tried to export a specific report or visualize your data from these systems, but to no avail? How many hours have you invested in manually exporting the data, or mastering Excel´s Power Query, to pump the digital values into a manageable spreadsheet? And then those additional hours spent formatting the values, filtering, counting, searching for long forgotten macros, generating pivot tables. Have you converted the commas into number points from that new European client report?
We know! This was the nightmare our C-suite lived, until the developers’ team from the Data Analysis unit at our IT mother firm suggested Power BI.
The statistical satire
Mature companies, including mature translation agencies, employ multiple, equally mature tools to help manage the different aspects of their existence. Be it ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or the niche TMS (Translation Management Systems), these systems and their various combinations ensure, in most cases, the management of projects, employees, vendors, finances and sales is a smooth sailing. However, often times such agencies run into issues when a complex report of data across these individual systems is needed.
Such situations then require a creative, often ad hoc and certainly laborious compensations, be it manual extraction of the data into a composite file or the use of an intermediate tool such as Power Query to transport the data into Excel an then subsequent “cleaning“, updating and transforming of the values to suitable formats. Not to mention the further labor involved in the calculations, checking, double checking and triple checking across previous reports, hunting for that lost decimal place searching for and eventually re-creating previously applied macros…the list goes on! And when you finally remember how to make that pivot table and the graph starts to look acceptable, you notice that the data in one of the original databases was updated and you can start anew.
There certainly are ways around this problem, with the easiest being “customization“ of your chosen TMS/CRM/ERP systems, however the process is pricey and lengthy and the journey to the optimal integration of the multiple systems can mean the whole company labors away on manually extracted reports for a few more years.
We were the same! Until the Data Analysis team, from our mother company exe, a.s., introduced us to a simple yet intelligent tool – Power BI.
Analysis to go
As if by magic, Power BI seamlessly extracts and analyses data across all our information systems. With the swing of your mouse, it transforms raw data in any form and transforms it into visualization of your liking and your report is ready to be processed just as your espresso brews. And you don’t even need to graduate from “Charms class” to have the full range of its uses under your belt. Not to mention the flexibility!
Team exe