A Personal Journey- From Excel to Power BI, how We founded Zerang, from contract life to Business life
I wasn’t always a contractor, I did start my career with a permanent job, heck I didn’t even know what contracting meant until I fond my way in the north side of Birmingham, my second love, the slow suburbs, the friendliness of people, and cannot forget the battered chips that only the midlands make. I always go back for some battered chips, if you haven’t tried them I suggest you make your way there ASAP and thank me later, maybe thank me by enquiring about Zerang. Haha I know that was cheeky of me but hey it’s my blog.
When I moved to Birmingham that’s where my life as serial contractor started. So if your in that contract hell and don’t think your career is going anywhere, believe me that it is, you are gaining so much more experience not only with your chosen career path, but valuable people experience which you wont get in a permanent job. You become more versatile, more strategic when being in different environments with different people that all have their own way of doing things, that you have to adapt to and then change ultimately.
Changing people? Did that go down well?, no but you learn as you make your way to the top, contract by contract, your skills get better, your business partnering gets better and ultimately you develop new ideas, new Ways of doing things that are just outdated in almost all companies. I haven’t been in one company that I can say have had their processes perfected.
The Excel stairway to hell or heaven?
All companies are still in the phase of relying solely on excel, having their models on excel, that will ultimately break or slow down processes due to large data that make the file take its time to open up. But hey all that means is that you go make your self a tea or a nice brew of coffee. I indeed prefer a hot cup of tea with some biscuits to unwind, rather than pulling hair because of excel crashing or my computer crashing because of large formulas it has to calculate every time you move your mouse!
This was slowing me down, people thought I was slow, but no when they used the same model for their work, they sympathised with me, asked me the tricks of coping. I told them, just grab some tea and biscuits and relax, but this didn’t help the waistline I’m afraid.
This is when I founded that Power BI could help eliminate a lot of these issues, why not transition these models into interactive pretty dashboards. I say pretty but you be surprised how many directors and CFO’s prefer colour than just words to beef up their presentation, or for them to even look at your work.
Power BI, my true saviour to life!
I learnt how Power BI works, what it can offer in conjunction with Excel, it made my life much easier when presenting month end variance analysis to different stakeholders of the business. No more emails telling me the excel model doesn’t work, or I was getting NA values because one of the directors did not know how to work excel.
It is simple, click on what you want to see from the interactive table and BOOM, it gives you all the output with relevant KPI’s to help make decisions. It was a success.
From this point on I started implementing Power BI for numerous businesses, making suggestions that we use power house tools like this to make life easier when presenting figures on a monthly basis. I implemented planful, Anaplan, Tableau. They all ran smoothly just like Power BI. The back end of the products was all the same. I talk a lot about variance analysis because that was mainly my job. But Power BI tools can be used to show headcount, delivery times, inventory and much much more.
The light bulb moment, why not start Zerang!
After much contracting me and co-founder Tanzil, Bumped heads and thought why don’t we start a business where we offer to make their dashboards, to implement Power BI where they can manage the data with a click of a button. How will small to medium sized business cope with paying £500 day rates to implement power BI. It takes the contractor 1 month to learn the business then start implementing, but hey if the contractor has 6 months, take your time, make that money right?
This is were we came up with a solution to Zerang, were we will implement and teach Power BI to your business within a shorter timeframe dependant on spec, go in do the job and get out, saving the company £000’s.
With Zerang we not only do the work, but we also allow you to maintain your own data, where other companies will see this as another revenue stream. We believe in helping the companies make profit, not take their profits!.
We will be hosting regular Power BI taster tips, where you will find myself and Tanzil at these events all online at the comfort of your sofa. So, if you have any questions in regard to power Bi, excel or my journey and need advice, feel free to join. We will help where we can at Zerang.
Let Zerang be your partner in unlocking the full potential of your data. Contact us today to get started!