Is power bi + excel or sql best for my requirements?

Question

In our organisation there are 6 departments (incl. HR & Admin). Each department's Manager prepare MIS - Management Information System monthly once and sends it to the Board for strategic decisions. Each department has MIS format in Excel and they fill it out every month and fields are almost similar for all depts. They consist details like value of services rendered & billed, collections against bills, individuals performance, any matters of client meetings that are important, learning sessions attended by members of dept. etc. Some are quantitative (billings, collection, performance ranks etc.) and others qualitative (comments, meetings minutes etc.)
Now as obvious there are 6 MIS a month and it's become difficult to combine them and put it in clear one dashboard to use for the board. So to automate this I've been tasked to come up with a solution.
I did some research and decided to provide a dashboard for the board in Power Bi using all 6 MIS.
Is this an optimal & useful solution?

Answer 1

I think Power BI sounds like a good fit for your problem, certainly a step in the right direction. BI solutions and visualizations are great at capturing, aggregating and analysing data, to support decision making. But typically this will work only with quantifyable information. If you want to show comments or memos on a dashboard, you may want to assign a priority or criticality level to each item, so only the most important points are shown to management.

I assume that the MIS reports are filled manually by the department leaders. So another thing to consider is linking the BI tool to the source data, like an ERP system or sales/billing application, so at least some of that data would be processed and captured automatically.

Answer 2

Thank you for the response