[MUSIC]
>> Hi, everybody. Welcome to
another Customer Power BI session at
the Microsoft Business
Applications Summit.
My name is Lauren Faber,
and I am a member of the Power
BI Customer Advisory Team.
I'm very excited to have Wikus
with us from Standard Bank today.
Standard Bank was able to
present last year at MBAS,
and I'm just very
excited to be able to
see what they've
achieved in just a year.
Wikus, if we could start by
having you go over the agenda for
today a little bit more about
Standard Bank and what your
role is at the company.
>> Hi, Lauren. Thank you for
giving us the opportunity
to showcase our Power BI journey.
It's always an honor
to present at MBAS.
As you've mentioned, we had
a privilege to present
at last year's MBAS,
and I will only recap the
start of our Power BI journey.
We'll also discuss
something that we as
a team are very excited about, BI+.
Then just the next steps on how we
actually onboard our
users to our environment.
My name is Wikus Kleynhans,
I'm the Power BI Platform Owner
for the Standard Bank Group.
I'm responsible for Power BI,
and our BI platforms in Africa.
I've been with Standard
Bank for six years now,
and I've over 10 years of experience
in business intelligence.
Standard Bank is a financial
institution that offers
banking and financial
services to individuals,
businesses, institutions,
and corporations throughout
Africa and abroad.
Standard Bank is the largest
banking group of assets in Africa.
We have a rich 157 year
history in South Africa,
and we started building a
franchise in Sub-Saharan Africa,
almost 30 years ago now.
The ICBC is Standard
Bank's biggest shareholder
with a stake of 20.1 percent.
Africa is our home,
we drive our growth.
>> Perfect. Thank you so
much for that intro, Wikus.
Now, if you could go over
a little bit more of
what was presented last year
with the original BI challenge.
>> We had a team of only 12 members,
supporting over 20,000
users across the world.
As you can imagine, these
12 members supporting
the BI community needs to
be SMEs in their fields.
Our main responsibilities
are focusing on
aspects like stability, security,
licensing, research and development,
as well as expert guidance,
to ensure that the platforms
perform ultimately.
We ensure that there is a solid
platform strategies in place,
and to create an easy to use,
efficient, and all around pleasant
experience for our users.
We spent a lot of time and effort
on the stability of our platforms,
making sure that platform is secure,
and we are sufficiently
and correctly licensed.
We believe that if these three
pillars aren't in place,
users won't actually make
use of our platform.
We won't have time to get
to the part that everybody
loves to do research and development.
We won't be able to
assist our customers
with the required expert
knowledge as well.
In order for us to implement
our core strategies,
we actually needed to implement
the following building blocks,
to ensure that Power
BI's properly scaled,
it is stable, it is always available,
the right level of
governance has been applied,
and the on-prem
gateways are in place.
We actually covered most of this
in our presentation last year,
and now only just summarize
what we're trying to
show in the slide.
From the start of our Power BI
journey at the end of 2017,
we did a lot of legwork upfront
to make sure that our
platforms are up and running,
and that it is stable.
Some of this being to
improve the monitoring,
for example, on the BI usage.
Our BI Analytics data warehouse is
something that we're very proud of,
and it provides us with insights
on how each individual user,
cost center, business unit,
and country are using our platforms
to ensure we plan effectively.
We can show exactly what BI assets
each user touches in
our organization.
We create a lot of alerting,
even on mobile devices to
know if something went wrong.
We can even kilostarts
services and processes using
our mobile phones on an in-house
developed app called Z app.
We focused predominantly
on user adoption,
and having ensured that
a functional foundation and
clearly defined
processes are in place,
it is now an easy and
seamless process to
on-board new users to our platform.
At the end of 2019 and
beginning of 2020,
we made a conscious decision to start
focusing on the value
added features available,
and the uptake has been incredible.
With a combination of a solid
foundation and since a lot of BI+,
our user adoption has
more than doubled
between April 2019 and April 2020.
Power BI is now used in 20 countries.
We have over 8,000 dashboards,
almost 14,000 users,
two and a half thousand workspaces
on the premium capacity,
and over 10,000 reports.
This has not been an
overnight success,
but a gradual process to
get everything in place.
>> That's really amazing
to see the growth that has
been able to happen just
even within a year's time.
It's neat to be able to
see that you establish
that foundation and you have that in
a solid place where
now you're able to
move forward and take your
BI to the next level.
Earlier in the presentation you
mentioned something called BI+,
and just barely you mentioned
it briefly, again, as well.
What exactly does that mean, BI+?
>> Faber, so we get asked
that question a lot.
What exactly is BI+?
It's a term that we coined for
every value adding
feature of a BI platform.
BI+ focuses on the more
modern BI techniques
that are currently available.
Many business users are only aware of
the more traditional
reporting mechanisms,
and this is because they were using
traditional reporting
tools until recently.
As they're on-boarded onto
the more modern BI platforms,
we need to make them aware of
these new features available.
Cognitive AI traditionally
would have been done by group
of data scientists to build
these machine learning models,
or cognitive features using
Python or R. But today,
companies like Microsoft has
made this part of their BI suit.
Because it has been made
part of the BI suit,
users no longer require
the deep mathematical and
statistical knowledge
needed to be able to
implement these features.
We started masterclasses, to
train our users on
using these features,
and showcasing the ease of
the use of implementing
more advanced features as part
of the reporting solutions,
and once they understand
the value add of this
and how much better decisions
they can make on their data,
that in turn drives
adoption of the BI tool.
So we get a bigger increase
on users of our platforms.
Everybody in today's world are
concerned with AI and data science,
and this is an easy
gateway to access this.
Now let's take an
example of smart alerts.
Users don't have to go and
look at their dashboards
everyday to see if a
certain event has occurred.
It can now be triggered using
Power Apps, for example,
or a feature within
Power BI can check in
our alerts on their mobile devices,
when a certain event
in the data happens.
We've enabled users to access
the data on any smart device,
no matter where they are.
Users can also embed the reports and
other applications like
SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams especially,
and I was business to
effectively collaborate,
share content and what we see as
developing and knowledge portal,
where business can create
a one-stop shop for all the
reporting requirements.
They can host meetings,
they can share documents,
create a Wiki on required
processes within a business unit,
and then, especially in
today's working environment,
they've a platform
where you can just say,
good morning, even when you are
working as Power as a team.
You can also use NLP,
natural language
processing, for example.
Users don't even have to write
one single line of code
to create a dashboard.
Once a data model has
been developed for
them by the technical team,
they can now create the dashboard
that suits their needs,
by using the language that
they're most comfortable with.
I will also show you a demo
on what I mean by this
a little bit later.
Forecasting, AutoML,
machine learning,
those are all new concept
that business isn't aware of,
and now we are showcasing them
[inaudible] clauses by
creating POCs for them.
They can see the value add.
No longer do business users have
a backwards looking view of the data,
but a forward looking
view of the data.
There are a lot of additional
features that we also showcase,
things like key influences,
forecasting, decomposition tree,
it is all tools that are
available to assist business,
to actually make better decisions,
and all of these are concepts
that we have then coined, BI+.
>> That makes a lot of sense
when you explain it that way,
and show that every value add
that you have here, BI platform.
You also mentioned that you have
prepared a demo to show us today.
Could we dive into that?
>> Yes. Basically, what
we show our users,
as soon as our customers approach us,
they're normally either
apprehensive to try anything new,
or they are always content on using
their current solution and not
keen to move to a new platform.
What is mostly recurring theme
is business saying they
aren't technically
enough to get a report themselves,
they're unfamiliar
with any AI concepts,
and they won't be able to
use these advanced features.
This demo will showcase
for them what is possible.
They don't need to
be a data scientist
to actually use these features.
As long as you understand your data,
you can build a meaningful report,
and we've deliberately made sure that
this demo is under five minutes,
to actually show them
that you can build
a dashboard in less
than five minutes.
Without the further ado,
let's move over to that demo.
To start off, we're going
to create a couple of
KPIs and then dragging the widgets
to the top of the dashboard.
We build these KPIs, like I said,
by only asking our data questions
and not writing any fancy code.
Firstly, we did total sales,
we drag it to the top.
Next we do the profit.
Power BI, [inaudible]
it sums it for you.
Just drag it to the top.
Make it look pretty,
and then next up, I want to
show the number of products.
Again, Power BI does
everything for you.
You just ask it or you're just
asking your data a question.
Next, I would like to see
the top three salesperson.
Power BI intuitive
picks up and provide
suggestions for you while you type.
>> You also have the option to create
a different visualization
if you don't want
the visualization that
Power BI provides for you.
But Power BI intuitive creates
a visualization that suites
your data or the datatype.
Then an example of how to create
a visualization of the one that
you want to show me the sales
by using a linear graph,
and you can do that.
Power BI can intuitively
chose that one for you.
Next we created visualization that
all business uses love to see,
and that is about plotting
your sales on a geo-map.
When you actually use geo-locations,
Power BI has the capability to
automatically plot
it on a map for you.
We did this one by postal code,
but you can type in if
you use the country name,
if use a city, if use a province.
Power BI can actually
intuitively create that on
a map for you without you
plotting on where those
geo-locations are.
Next up, show me all the
products for each state.
Again, Power BI chooses
the visualization for you.
It creates a bar chart that you
can also change if you wanted to.
We move that to the
right bottom corner
just to make it more
visually appealing.
Everything sorted.
If you have it over these bars,
it actually pops up
a little tool tip for you
with the number of products,
with the name of the states.
These tool tips are
also customizable,
and actually very customizable.
That's a great feature.
Next up, we're going to
actually going to start using
some additional AI features,
and apply insights to explain
the fluctuations in this visual.
Again, this is all done in
the background for you.
It gives you a whole list
of insights into your data.
If you want to use
one of these visuals,
you just click on it,
and it's added to your dashboard.
You don't have to export the data,
will ask a data scientist
to develop a model
for you to analyze data.
Everything is built
in and ready to use.
We can also go back to a chart
that we carried earlier,
this line chart with
the sales per year,
and then analyze what
the decrease for the sales
between 2015 and 2016 is.
What's nice about is,
actually automatically it picks
up of this if it's an
increase or decrease.
Again, it's going to do
all the hard work
in the background without you writing
any code or doing
anything on your end.
Again, there's a lot of
different graphs that
you can choose from if you don't like
the first one that's given to you.
You can also add the graph to
your dashboard if you wanted to.
There is also the nice
feature at the top,
you'll see the thumbs
up, and the thumbs down.
So you can actually
provide some feedback to
the Power BI program managers
on the usefulness of
these visualizations.
We can add that onto the
graph now to the dashboard.
So we use different types of graphs,
and the visuals that you
can add to your dashboards.
So that's how easy to
actually to create
one page of a dashboard on your data.
This was done in less
than three minutes.
Next up, we can add some
additional features.
I want to add one more page or
something that I actually like
that you're going to struggle
doing on your own if you don't
understand the logic behind it.
I actually want to see
all the factors that affect
items being returned.
So for that, I'm going to use the
key influences visualization.
First up, you select the column
that you want to analyze,
and then you move fields that
you think of might influence
the writing into the
explain bar field.
You can use their key influence step
to assess each factor individually,
or you can click on the top
segment step to see how
combination of factors affects
the matrix that you're analyzing.
Lucky, so if I click on
one of those bubbles,
it actually draws down into
the segment to give me an
explanation of the values.
That is molding a dashboard
in less than five minutes.
>> You make it look so easy.
I love that demo.
It really makes it seem
undaunting to be able
to create a dashboard,
and to be able to use Power BI.
So thank you for that.
You come along way.
In a year, you have
people who are starting
to really adopt Power BI.
You've been able to
create this BI plus.
So you are on this really good path,
but what does that mean as next
for the journey with
BI at Standard Bank.
>> Also that. Usually, after
show casing this demo,
business is normally very impressed.
They want to know how
did they get onto this?
How did they start using Power BI?
Then also when will these
features be available?
So what's great is
if you can tell them
everything that they saw
is available right now.
It's available immediately.
That's usually when they
get very, very excited.
They want to get stuck
in straight away.
They want to know what
are the next steps?
What's the cost?
Etc. Normally, what we do is we
suggest running a small
master class on the data,
and then showing them
what's possible.
Then we also advise them to maybe do
some self-paced online training
or registered for
classroom based training.
We add them to our team site.
We got a team site that we've
also get another
presentation last year.
There's a vast amounts
of training material
in there, interesting articles.
We got a very active
power of the AI community
of over 2,000 users,
and everything that
they might need is
in there to actually
start using Power BI.
We are looking at,
especially now maybe doing some more
online instructor led training
by our Center of Excellence,
where we can maybe do
the dashboard in a day,
dashboard in an hour, whatever.
Maybe some modeling training.
We have also the next phase in
our Power BI journey is our
roll-out into the rest of Africa.
That's us in a nutshell,
and to be continued.
>> Perfect. Thank you so much.
Do you have any last things that
you want to add before we end?
>> No. We appreciate all the
assistance we get from you guys,
especially the program managers.
They are always open
and eager to help
>> Oh, thank you. We're
glad to have you here.
Thanks, Wikus.
>> Thanks, Lauren. I appreciate it.
