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Winning with AI: Build the BI Race Car Before You Turbocharge It with AI

Winning with AI: Build the BI Race Car Before You Turbocharge It with AI Table of Contents Winning with AI: Build the BI Race Car Before You Turbocharge It with AI AI doesn’t replace human creativity and insight—it enhances them by tracking more variables than any human possibly can, identifying trends and risks in real time. But just like a race car, without the right structure and skilled drivers, adding more speed doesn’t make you faster—it makes you crash harder. Your Best Drivers Will Train AI to Help Them Win AI isn’t here to take the wheel. For the foreseeable future, humans will remain behind the wheel of business, making strategic decisions that drive growth. But AI can be the ultimate co-pilot—alerting leaders to risks, opportunities, and changing conditions before they’re obvious. Building the Race Car: BI Is the Foundation Before you can race ahead with AI, you first need a foundation with sound fundamentals: Integrated workflows and data across departments. Broken processes and reporting blind spots create functional silos, preventing accurate, trusted reporting. Finance, sales, supply chain, and operations must work from one version of the truth. A dashboard that provides real-time visibility into the measures that drive revenue, operating margin, and cash flow. Just as you wouldn’t drive a car by looking out the rear window, business teams need clear visibility into what’s happening now, how performance is trending, and actionable insights on risks and opportunities. Upskill your best drivers—your business SMEs—not just on the tools, but on the cross-functional dependencies that drive performance of your aggregate KPIs. These individuals must be intimately involved—not only to understand the system, but to help design it. They aren’t just passengers; they are the engineers of your team’s BI race car, building the capability to accelerate on the straightaways and brake confidently into the curves.  Learning to Drive Before Adding AI Once BI is in place—with workflows connected and reporting dashboards fine-tuned—teams will begin to trust reports and use them to drive decisions. Teams proactively collaborate to identify risks and opportunities early, while there’s still time to control the outcome. This fosters a culture of teamwork, ownership, and accountability. Individuals and teams master the fundamentals of decision-making using real-time data, which only comes with experience. As teams analyze patterns, identify opportunities, and adjust course in real time, they develop the instincts and expertise needed to push the business forward. Game-changing insight and decisions drive significant business impact during this stage. Once teams are winning races with BI-driven decision-making, they’re ready to supercharge the race car with AI. AI as the Race Strategist—Not the Driver AI doesn’t replace human judgment—it enhances it by tracking more variables than any human possibly can, so your driver can make informed decisions to win the race. Changing Track Conditions. AI alerts you to shifts in market trends, customer behavior, or supply chain disruptions before they impact performance. Crashes You Don’t See Yet. AI detects early warning signs of operational risks or financial stress before they escalate. Fuel Burn Rate & Tire Wear. AI monitors resource utilization, workforce productivity, and cost efficiency, ensuring you’re managing operating margin. Laps Before a Problem Emerges. AI forecasts when issues like cash flow strain, inventory shortages, or capacity constraints could arise, giving teams time to discuss and decide on corrective action. The Winning Formula First, build the race car. Establish BI as the foundation, ensuring trusted data, real-time reporting, and integrated workflows. Fine-tune the dashboard. Make sure your best drivers—your business leaders—have the visibility they need to make strategic decisions. Learn to win races. Your team gains experience, confidence, and passion for team-based problem solving.  Then, and only then, add AI as the turbocharger. Once you know how to drive, AI greatly enhances your ability to anticipate and react to changing business conditions. Don’t Skip Steps—Build First, Then Turbocharge Too many organizations try to bolt AI onto a system that isn’t ready for it. The result? Unreliable insights, lack of adoption, and wasted investment.    At Ascent Innovations, we help businesses build the race car first—integrating processes, structuring data, and designing real-time analytics that empower decision-making. Once that foundation is in place, AI becomes a force multiplier, accelerating what’s already working.     Are you ready to take control of your business performance before adding AI? Let’s build the race car first—so you can win with data and AI when the time is right. About the Author John Bruhnke is Managing Director at Ascent. He has 25 years of management consulting experience focused on system implementation and, for the last 7 years, modern analytics in the manufacturing industry. He collaborates with executive and management teams to drive alignment on strategic goals and develop a collective vision for modernization that balances both immediate business needs and long-term strategy.  John Bruhnke Managing Director Icon-linkedin Latest Posts You might also like:

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Power BI: Driving Your Business—With a Forward-Looking View

Power BI: Driving Your Business—With a Forward-Looking View Table of Contents Power BI: Driving Your Business—With a Forward-Looking View Most businesses are still trying to make high-speed decisions while staring into the rearview mirror. They rely on static reports, outdated spreadsheets, and fragmented data—then act surprised when they hit a pothole.    Power BI fixes that. Done right, it’s the equivalent of driving with a clear windshield, in real time, with a dashboard that tells you what’s happening right now—not two weeks ago or last month.  Power BI: The View Executives Actually Need Executives need more than lagging indicators and end-of-month surprises. A properly implemented Power BI dashboard gives them real-time visibility into actual performance versus forecast and budget—all in a single view.  Revenue, margin, operating cash flow, and OTIF performance—all current and accurate to the day, available on desktop and mobile. Who needs a news feed or social media when you can check your dashboard first thing in the morning?  Early warning signals—Power BI doesn’t just tell you that margins are compressing; it helps you see why.  If operating margin is decreasing, click into margin to see what’s causing the compression—rising raw material costs? Higher than expected R&D spend on a new initiative? Something else entirely? You name it.  In short? It stops the guessing game and brings actual financial and operational performance to the surface. And with transparency comes accountability.  For Departments: No More Excel Monstrosities Every department has The Spreadsheet—that massive, fragile, manual data beast that some poor soul updates every morning before their coffee even kicks in.    Power BI replaces the need for these time-consuming, error-prone Excel reports by:  Pulling from a centralized, single source of truth—so every department is working with accurate, consistent data.  Delivering real-time insights—so teams aren’t making decisions based on last week’s or last month’s numbers.  Empowering teams to investigate performance issues—igniting an intellectual curiosity and culture of collaborative, fact-based problem-solving.  For example, instead of manually piecing together production performance reports, the Manufacturing team can see a Production vs. Forecast dashboard that instantly highlights underperformance. They can drill into trends—labor productivity, downtime, yield rates—to pinpoint the root cause and work cross-functionally with sales and operations to fix issues before they escalate.  For Cross-Functional Teams: Breaking the Cycle of ‘Why Didn’t We See This Coming?’ Power BI turns “we didn’t see that coming” into “we saw this early and here’s what we did to avoid that costly issue.”  Finance, sales, and operations can monitor trends daily instead of waiting for month-end fire drills.  Strategic FP&A teams can collaborate cross-functionally to analyze emerging risks and opportunities—shifts in demand, competitive pressures, supply chain disruptions—while there’s still time to adjust course.  Instead of just tracking numbers, teams can proactively manage outcomes by acting on real-time insights.  Seeing Beyond the Road Ahead: Using the Past to Predict the Future A rearview mirror isn’t useless—it’s just not where you should be looking while accelerating. Power BI allows you to combine historical data with real-time visibility, creating predictive models that extend your field of vision.  Identify demand patterns over time—uncover seasonal trends, customer buying behaviors, and shifts in operational performance.  Use AI-assisted analytics to forecast outcomes—combine historical trends with real-time data to anticipate shifts before they happen.  Make proactive adjustments—instead of reacting after problems occur, leverage predictive models to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities.  When historical patterns are combined with present conditions, organizations gain an early-warning system that allows them to steer toward growth while avoiding unnecessary risk.  The Bottom Line: Drive Looking Out the Windshield, Not the Rearview Mirror If your business is still making critical decisions based on old, disconnected, manually updated reports, you’re driving blind.    Power BI doesn’t just provide better reports—it changes how businesses operate. It replaces reactionary, gut-driven decision-making with real-time, data-backed execution—turning insight into action before it’s too late to course-correct.    At Ascent Innovations, we don’t just implement Power BI. We make sure it works the way you need it to—so your teams have trusted, real-time data, clear visibility, and the ability to make proactive business decisions with confidence.     Ready to stop looking in the rearview mirror? Let’s make sure you have the right dashboard to drive forward.    John Bruhnke Managing Director Icon-linkedin Latest Posts You might also like:

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Business Insights for Employee Evaluations or: Why No One Cares What You Think, KAREN!

Business Insights for Employee Evaluations or: Why No One Cares What You Think, KAREN! Table of Contents Business Insights for Employee Evaluations or: Why No One Cares What You Think, KAREN! When people think of Business Insights—specifically Microsoft Power BI—they typically associate it with financial or sales analysis. And why not? Money makes or breaks a business. But let’s not forget that people drive sales, control costs, and manage customer satisfaction.   So, how do you track people? Informally, you get vague, off-the-cuff comments (“Karen’s just not great at her job. Also, I think she may be keeping a cat in her file cabinet.”). Formally, you have lengthy peer and self-evaluations—great for self-reflection, but also a fantastic way to create anxiety as coworkers try to figure out who gave them a bad review (I’m on to you, Karen). While subjective reviews provide valuable insights, anyone who has managed a team will tell you: numbers add credibility. That’s where Power BI steps in—transforming raw data into meaningful, reportable, and actionable insights. From Spreadsheets to Smart Analytics I used to keep massive spreadsheets filled with daily order-entry counts, quotation follow-up reports, and order-expediting calls. Manually updating formulas and charts was a time-consuming headache, especially when sensitive data had to be shared selectively. I also watched others attempt similar tracking methods, only for the system to fall apart once a supervisor became too busy to maintain it.   Enter Microsoft Power BI. Instead of manually updating reports and wasting time on formatting, Power BI automates data pulls, updates dashboards in real time, and distributes reports efficiently. It’s faster, more accurate, and far less frustrating than maintaining endless Excel sheets. Power BI: Connecting the Dots Power BI can pull data from just about anywhere. Call logs? Pulled from a VOIP system. Quotes and follow-ups? Imported from your CRM or SQL database. Daily billing records? Integrated and matched against Accounts Receivable error reports. The data you need is probably already stored somewhere in your organization—Power BI simply connects to it and keeps it up to date with scheduled refreshes.   Beyond pulling data, Power BI turns it into something useful. Instead of confronting an employee with vague complaints about billing errors, you can use Power BI to pinpoint exactly where they’re struggling and identify patterns over time. It also balances the data by highlighting areas where an employee is excelling, creating a well-rounded view of performance. With real-time dashboards, employees can track their own progress, giving them visibility into how they’re doing. From Metrics to Motivation Power BI isn’t just about tracking performance—it’s a tool for motivation. Setting up sales or shipping contests using weekly ratios? Done. Aligning performance data with pre-established goals? Easy. When positioned correctly, these numbers tell a much bigger story, helping employees understand where they stand and how they can improve.   Managing people and evaluating performance is tough, but a good manager combines hard data with subjective feedback to help employees grow. A tool like Power BI transforms cold, abstract metrics into a visual, comprehensive representation of performance—and, in some cases, the suspiciously high cat-to-file cabinet ratio. About the Author Matthew Newcomb is an experienced and certified Microsoft Dynamics AX & 365 Trade & Logistics Functional Senior Consultant who knows that when it comes to ERP implementations—and employee performance—data makes all the difference. As a functional solution architect, business analyst, and project wrangler, he helps companies move beyond gut feelings and guesswork, using Microsoft Dynamics and Power BI to turn raw numbers into meaningful insights. Whether it’s optimizing operations or tracking the mysterious disappearance of office supplies (looking at you, Karen), Matthew ensures businesses get the most out of their Microsoft solutions—without the headaches. Author: Matthew Newcomb Senior Solution Consultant Icon-linkedin Latest Posts You might also like: