Volta reports and visualises quarterly figures effortlessly with Power BI

Volta, which has previously collaborated with Anchr, was looking for a way to optimise the creation of its reports. ‘Generating the (quarterly) reports required a lot of manual work each time and needed various custom SQL queries that had to be adjusted again for each period’, says Thomas Wouters, Business Development Manager BI at Anchr.

‘Volta was seeking a way to automate this process so that generating reports would be less time-consuming and the visualisation of the data would become simpler. ‘With Microsoft Power BI's data science and business intelligence solution, we found the right solution to transform all the separate data into a nice and, above all, clear report every quarter, in just a few clicks,’ says Wendy De Bruyn, Coordinator of finance and additional allowances at Volta.   

Anchr supported Volta in setting up its BI environment and provided guidance on the utilisation of the environment. Anchr first developed a data model for Volta. ‘The custom SQL queries, or so-called scripts, that Volta repeatedly used to perform the reports, were the starting point,’ says Joran De Wilde, Data Scientist at Anchr. ‘We thoroughly analysed these queries to then consolidate them into one data model in Power BI.’ Wendy De Bruyn adds: ‘Where Volta used to manually adjust each query separately, sometimes with external help, for a new period or another parameter, we can now simply change a field in the data model, so that the entire report updates in just a few clicks and clearly displays the data’.   

Subsequently, Volta received the calculations so that it could independently create detailed reports in Power BI, without prior knowledge. This allowed Volta to focus on the formatting and layout of the report. ‘With great results,’ says Thomas Wouters, ‘because it enabled them to create a visually very nice report’.     

‘At first, we hesitated to choose Microsoft Power BI, but we quickly saw the match for our organisation,’ says Wendy De Bruyn. ‘By using Power BI, we have primarily achieved a significant time saving. What used to take us hours can now be done in minutes. We no longer need external help either.’ 

‘The model is dynamic for the future,’ says Joran De Wilde. ‘Additional required reports can be easily added.’

Business Intelligence, or 'BI' for short, is about collecting, analysing, and visualising data in a meaningful way. There is a lot of knowledge hidden in data from which organisations can learn and subsequently take concrete steps based on the insights derived from the data.

‘It is more important than ever nowadays,’ says Thomas Wouters. ‘Organisations sit on a wealth of data. However, it is often quite a challenge to present that data clearly so that effective insights can emerge.’

This is where Anchr can support your organisation. Anchr assists in visualising all available data thanks to market-leading business intelligence and data science solutions such as Power BI.