Building standalone web and mobile apps has traditionally been challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. Application development in the past could have huge cost impacts on a company, and despite best efforts from a variety of stakeholders, many struggled to prove return on investment.

Microsoft Power Apps helps tackle all of the problems that have plagued application development in the past. It’s a low/no-code application platform, which makes app development anything but challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. And when it comes to demonstrating ROI from efforts, that’s where PowerBI comes into play.

Power Apps: Like Legos for Application Development

One of the easiest ways to think of Power Apps is like Legos for application development. Power Apps allows anyone to build apps using modules that, like Legos, are a predefined size and shape. Each is designed to plug and play together to simplify a particular function, such as manual data entry, paper forms, and document generation.

Once these different Power Apps modules are connected, they become one powerful platform to support your business, helping your team to become more efficient and eliminating errors that come from many manual processes.

What do you stand to gain from tapping into the power of Power Apps? A recent study by Forrester found that Microsoft Power Apps users experienced more than 188% ROI in 3-4 years, reduced development costs by 74%, and saw an average of 3.2 hours/week in employee productivity gains while working on the platform.

At Cambay, we have seen similar benefits from customers using Power Apps, and we strive to provide enhanced mobility, productivity, and innovation for our clients.

Some key areas where Cambay can tap into Power Apps to help your business:

• Build standalone web and mobile apps, or customize existing apps in Office 365 & D365
• Connect to all your data with 425+ pre-built connectors and custom connectors
• Tap into AI-based solutions to help in building connected services
• Provide enterprise-grade governance on data and security controls for citizen development
• Consult on pro-developer extensibility, enabling a true “no limits” platform that runs the gamut from business users to professional developers.

Getting Deeper Insights into ROI with PowerBI

If you’re interested in showing the kind of results mentioned in the recent Forrester study, with PowerBI you can. Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools for connecting data from various data sources to power interactive dashboards and analysis reports. It allows us to easily visualize data that’s most important to our business and share that data across an organization. In short, PowerBI puts you closer than ever before to your company’s data, no matter where you are or what device you’re on.

We at Cambay have helped a number of clients tap into PowerBI to become more data-driven and to develop a laser focus on ROI.

For one of our telecommunications clients, we built a PowerBI reporting platform to fuel their Marketing & Sales pipeline based on an AI-driven data model. For another client, we built a data gateway that works as the bridge between the Power Bl Service and the client’s on-premises data sources like DirectQuery, Import, and Live Query.

PowerBI helps remove the problem of reporting on data silos and allows companies to have a single place to track metrics that impact ROI.

Key features of PowerBI

• Customization is the bedrock feature of PowerBI, allowing developers to easily create and modify default visualization and reporting tools and import new tools into the platform.
• Under the core concept of data management, PowerBI makes it easy to ingest various data structures, including relational data, big data, IoT data, and streaming data.
• With data modeling and Real-time Streaming with Power BI REST APIs, you can gain access to real-time data when it’s actually actionable, not after the fact.
• Security is a key component of the platform, as it provides Row-level security which simply means we have control/access to a single row, along with data encryption and Compliance with ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EU Clauses, HIPAA BAA, and UK G-Cloud, making the platform a market leader.

When it comes to PowerBI, Cambay can help clients develop dashboards and visualizations to track Marketing and Sales Analytics, Operational Analytics, IoT analytics for monitoring and tracking Enterprise-wide BI, and much more.