Description
Automate tracking Coronavirus (COVID-19) statistics?
Every business is having to make decisions about how to respond to the ever-changing Coronavirus situation. The decisions that each business must take is unique to their circumstances.
We found ourselves spending a huge amount of time looking at graphs from various sources and trying to judge what they meant for us and the business. This was confusing, time consuming and draining.
Our solution has been to create our own objective measures that we understand, that are relevant to our circumstances and that are visible to everyone in the organisation.
We have created this using 2 technologies that are free to use. Microsoft PowerBI and the Governments own Coronavirus statistics that are available electronically. Using these 2 tools we have created our own visual display of Corona Virus statistics that are specific to us and can be used to drive our business decisions. As a team we all know that a consistent calculation method is being is being used. We have created our own triggers that have been agreed by everyone knows and that drives our actions.
The best thing about it is that having created the report it now updates with the latest statistics automatically 8 times every day. No-one is having to collect statistics every day and type them into Excel.
The graphical report is available to everyone in the organisation on a page in Microsoft Teams at the click of a button.
This is a live example of the report, you can change pages and jump to full screen mode. The report is updated daily.
This is a perfect demonstration of how PowerBI can be used to collect, collate and display business information in a fully automated way.
It is also just one example of the data that is available to everyone from HMRC through their Open Data initiative. Much statistical information is available electronically that can be collected automatically by tools like PowerBI and Excel and incorporated into business reporting.
If you would like a copy of the PowerBI report to adapt to your own purposes, you are welcome to download it from here:
If you would like help in adapting it to suit your own purposes, then you can buy an hour of our time here (which should be sufficient to most situations):