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The team at Geordie Consulting has a wealth of experience and expertise in helping businesses use their data to achieve their goals. A key challenge for any organisation that wants to manage its data well is to have a good data preparation strategy. Data prep is not easy and cannot be done separately and secretly. Centralising and reusing your organisation’s data creates a level of transparency that was missing when everything was isolated.

We promote the use of the Power Platform to standardise business processes. We use Power Automate to populate SharePoint Lists or Dataverse Tables, which are then available for manual processing using PowerApps. This smooth process ensures effective data management and automation for your organisation. This solution stops the frequent situation of “Oh yeah, we have a spreadsheet [insert name here] manages; we use that as the source for [insert business critical report name]”. These stories may seem funny, but the truth is that almost every business we work with has Excel spreadsheets that are vital for business and yet are not documented. There are often complex formulae, pivot tables and hidden sheets inside the sheet. It is not rare to find worksheets telling people to put copies of new data in sheet X and then refresh the sheet or run a macro. The other businesses usually have Access 97 databases running a business-critical solution.

 

 

 

It is recognised that there is a demand to improve how data is cleansed, where data validations, normalisations, and progress are tracked, and that having an available toolset is sensible. Power Automate allows “if this then that” automation to trigger updates, transfer files and data or notify. PowerApps enable people to interact with the data, to cleanse it, manipulate it or modify it in a tracked and secure environment. Power BI offers so much power to those companies that use it, but medium to long-term success with it is only achievable when additional tools are used. The Power Platform is meant to be a Business tool with IT providing support; the siloed legacy world was business-owned with IT sidelined (I’ve yet to meet an IT Manager who would agree with the idea of a business-critical Excel spreadsheet sitting on someone’s PC). IT-owned solutions often fail because they are perceived as “intrusive” or “overly complex”. The Power Platform provides what is needed regarding governance and agility for business users.

Contact us if you want to try our free PowerApp, which is expected to launch with the next Geordie Intelligence video series.

Geordie Consulting is a boutique Power Platform Consultancy based in the middle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.  We support our global clients in harnessing the full power of their data through semantic modelling, reporting, process mining, apps, and automation. We offer comprehensive training to empower your teams to confidently use, maintain, and develop your organisation’s data capabilities.