As an HR professional, managers tend to collect vast amounts of data. Unfortunately, this data often remains unused. Once they start to analyze human resource challenges by using this data, they are engaged in HR data analytics.

What is HR analytics?

HR analytics, also referred to as people analytics, workforce analytics, or talent analytics, involves gathering, analyzing, and reporting HR data. It enables your organization to measure the impact of a range of HR metrics on overall business performance and make decisions based on data. In other words, HR analytics is a data-driven approach toward Human Resources Management. By using HR analytics, you can improve on your decisions that impact HR functions.

How is HR Analytics Useful?

To be successful and gain a competitive edge, an organization and its department must keep improving in the ways they function. Embracing digitization and business intelligence is one of the key components which can help the organization improve in its day-to-day functions. And it is true for every department of the organization including Human resources.

HR analytics provides HR directors with the data they need to optimize HR functions and employee satisfaction. With the constant flood of technological advances threatening the workplace, it’s more important than ever to manage people intelligently and assist them throughout their demanding employment lifespan. Enhancing HR strategy using HR analytics can improve work satisfaction and result in a healthy business culture with engaged employees.

HR analytics can help human resource people in some of the ways like:

1. Establish a current performance baseline so that the HR professional knows where their company sits on the metrics that are most relevant to them.

2. Make observations and draw inferences from this benchmark to come up with hypotheses about possible solutions to the problems you’re facing.

3. Implement a process change that is specially designed to evaluate the hypothesis’s validity.

4. Monitor the results so that the change’s influence may be assessed, understood, or reversed.

HR Analytics use case

Problem statement:

A large enterprise came to us. They wanted to streamline the people management in the organization to view and forecast the attrition/termination rate of the organization. So that the HR group could preplan a future goal for hiring in the coming quarters.

Solution:

We recommended implementing an end-to-end HR analytics and reporting solution – built on Microsoft Power BI – to help HR across the business discover useful insights for strategic decision-making. It should also enable HR professionals to make data-driven decisions to attract, manage, and retain employees, which improves ROI and helps leaders make decisions to create better work environments and maximize employee productivity. The solution had a major impact on the bottom line when HR team members used it effectively. The solution allows capturing data from any source such as Payday, Keka, Workday, ADP, Oracle HCM, SAP Success Factor, Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and many more with possible integrations.

We have leveraged the default AI – ML and forecasting feature of Power BI. We prepared and trained the data into binary, classification, and regression models to create the insights of the predictive report to do further analysis of attrition rate prediction for the client.

Benefit:

• Prediction reports assist HR team members in setting future people management goals for the company.
• We also focused on making navigation on the multiple pages of various reports as simple as possible, with the necessary tooltips. These tool instructions make it very simple for users to figure out how to apply a specific image for comprehension.
• In addition, the client’s whole HR team was given a secure platform to have genuine access to the report. Distinct teams needed to perceive the data in their way, thus the visualizations had to be different. For example, some are from the Talent team, while others are from Finance, and they each had access to the report. This aided the organization’s data integrity by ensuring data consistency between HR and other departments.

Key KPIs and dashboards in HR analytics

There can be several HR metrics or KPIs in the HR department of every organization. It usually depends on the HR functioning of the company or sometimes the company culture also.

Some stakeholders are interested to see the attrition rate in their company while others may be interested to see employee happiness or satisfaction as the key KPI. It all depends on how you see the results of your HR analytics.

Another important way to see your data is how your raw data is being captured in your HRMS system. What are the labels or the fields in which your raw data is being saved? One of the important jobs of a BI solution is making your disparate sources show uniform data.

Let us see what are the Key KPIs or metrics and dashboards are commonly tracked in a  basic HR analytics solution.

1. Hiring Time Period.

The average time it takes you to hire a new employee, from the time you advertise a job to the time they accept an offer of employment. You can figure it out by adding up the time spent on each new employee and dividing it by the number of recruits in a given time period.

2. Average and Total Hiring Cost.

What is the cost to hire a new employee for your company? This includes costs such as the recruiter’s time, the cost of posting a job on a third-party site, interviewing time, and so on.

3. Employee turnover rate.

Every company desires a low staff turnover rate. There could be a problem with your hiring or staffing procedure if you’re constantly losing employees and having to hire new ones. Keep a close eye on this number.

4. Absenteeism.

The amount of time your employees are absent from work for whatever cause is referred to as absenteeism (vacation, sick days, other). Absenteeism metrics are expressed as a percentage of total available working days.

5. Earnings or Revenue per employee.

It’s simple to calculate your revenue per employee. Simply divide the entire income of that company for the year by the number of employees you have. This statistic can also be used for individual departments.

6. Employee engagement.

It is one of the most difficult metrics to track because there is no measure to score it. You can send out business-wide questionnaires to your staff, asking them to score their experience working for the company on a scale of one to five. The average of the data can be used to determine your degree of employee engagement.

There is a huge list of several KPIs which are important in some or another way to the Human resources team.

Predictive Analytics and Forecasting In HR

The use of Predictive analytics gained its place long back but recently it has become a popular and kind of mandatory analytical metric. Specific insights on what to expect in the future are a tremendous competitive advantage for organizations, and HR can leverage this technology to transform the business impact of the function drastically. HR analytics have an equal impact on the Human resource team, employees, and stakeholders.

There are several use cases of Predictive analytics in HR but companies might find some of them applicable in their way. Some of the uses cases can be:

1. To determine attrition rate: if an HR team wants to determine the rate of attrition for the next two fiscal years, it can leverage predictive analytics to identify the future turnover rate based on historical patterns within existing data. Using these insights, HR can then proactively engage and retain employees and reduce turnover.

2. To Bridge skill gap: A predictive analytics algorithm can assist discover the skills gaps in the business using historical data. It can assist corporate owners in determining whether to hire new employees or upskill existing ones. Business leaders can correctly assess which personnel demand the greatest attention in terms of skill development, as well as which areas require improvement.

3. To improve employee productivity: Predictive analytics can be used to maximize a candidate’s role within the organization. Data can be evaluated to assess an employee’s performance by keeping track of tasks, particularly those that are difficult for them to complete. This can assist the employee to improve in the areas where he or she is lacking. Training and counseling sessions can then be scheduled to help the person improve their performance and, as a result, their productivity.

4. To retain top talent: Evaluation of the top performers can be easily done through performance indicators and statistics. Later, with the help of predictive analytics, Factors such as pay packages in other organizations for similar job profiles, additional incentives offered, and growth opportunities at other organizations need to be evaluated. Thus, human resources managers can come up with a contingency plan that might prevent the top employees from leaving the workplace.

Final Thoughts!

HR analytics helps you fully understand what is currently happening and what is required to keep the business operations running smoothly. HR professionals who want to succeed in today’s competitive digital world must be able to learn fast and adapt to the changing business trends.  And HR analytics enables them to prepare for entry into this digital world.

At Beyond Key, we have developed Power BI dashboards that cover all the major KPIs related to HR analytics. These dashboards can take up data from any of your sources (HRMS tool or any CRM or ERP) and using this data- Power BI dashboards can be prepared. Making data-driven decisions is possible with these dashboards. Simply connect with us to get a Free demo of our Power Bi dashboards for HR analytics today.

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Government agencies in any country are some of the biggest data collecting and storing agencies. They gather primarily big data and analyze it before finalizing any new policy, rule, or regulation. Gone are the days when agencies served as administrative bodies. They mainly focus on setting and enforcing new laws and collecting, processing, and storing information.  Citizens now expect better, more convenient services and programs from federal, state, and local entities. That is why many government organizations have decided to embrace technology to help with their data needs. They implement business intelligence tools and technology to better address the needs of the communities they serve while operating more productively and cost-efficiently.

Application of Business Intelligence in Public Sector

With a BI and reporting solution, organizations in the public sector can streamline and automate tedious data reporting and analysis processes. With more efficient operations, organizations can better allocate resources.

There are several application areas where BI services can help employees in the public sector analyze their data and make smarter decisions quickly. They can always better serve the community with optimized operations and services. Let’s see how:

1. Monitor optimal use of public funds

Public financial management relates to the way governments manage public funds and the impacts on the growth of the economy and the wellbeing of citizens. Managing shared resources involves how the government earns and spends money. Revenue comes from taxes, state enterprises, or foreign aid, etc. Nowadays, agencies use BI dashboards and reporting tools to analyze how this public fund is allocated and used. Additionally, transparency must be maintained among the staff, citizens, and stakeholders, so people responsible for making optimal use are answerable.

2. Study Big data

Government agencies keep collecting a large amount of information related to the population. Whether census data or election voter data, government organizations can discover meaningful correlations between education, unemployment, crime rates, and more by leveraging these large population data sets. They can quickly figure out population categories based on income groups, education status, and age-wise data based on which new facilities can be extended to the required masses.

3. Task and workforce management

Many times, the state faces different kinds of emergencies. The nature of emergencies makes it challenging for public safety agencies to manage their workforce and processes. Power BI and other business intelligence tools create intuitive visual dashboards that access information like ongoing projects and resources involved in the different tasks.

Related articles:

Healthcare Analytics and its Impact on Hospital Performance

Why Your Nonprofit Need Data Analytics and BI dashboards?

4. Healthcare facility overview

With Power BI and other BI tools in place, you can easily consolidate all electronic medical data and records to analyze results in intuitive executive dashboards. Hospital stakeholders can understand the impacts of public decision-making on public health and safety and increase quality reporting compliance and patient satisfaction with minimal cost and time.

5. One common portal for citizen

It is also crucial for the government and public sector to be transparent in their approach. There should be one common portal for citizens to view the information; they need to build trust with the government. The portal can help the automatic publishing of reports accessible by the citizens via the web, which contains constantly updated information on the allocation of public funds concerning all acts subject to transparency. Furthermore, the solution provides an interactive, multi-dimensional analysis system, which allows officials and entity managers to monitor data relating to expenditure and funds and perform complex analyses autonomously on fundamental indicators of effectiveness in the use of funds.

6. Self-service reports for non-technical users

Self-service business intelligence tools enable public sector users to modify reports and dashboards as per their immediate requirements without much dependency on their IT counterparts. Users can filter or produce reports visualizing their critical indicators in the most meaningful way. They can independently create analyses especially addressing their needs, and derive new insight from relevant government processes. Furthermore, it is easy to adapt reports to your specific needs. In this way, self-service functions provide users with a higher level of flexibility in creating reports to non-techy government officials.

Final Thoughts!

The fundamental concept of e-Governance technology use is how you keep a unique, transparent relationship between citizens and the government. To achieve this goal, the organization must leverage a unified, single view across multiple agencies and departments. Power BI and other BI tools like Domo, Tableau, etc., can create rich visuals at their levels. Check out the comparison here.

In the past decade, we have worked for several government organizations and empowered them with our Business intelligence services and customizable dashboards and reports to make the processes and results in the public sector transparent and trustworthy.

Our Business Intelligence experts can assist you in assessing, planning, acquiring, designing, and implementing these robust solutions in record time, generating savings along the way.

If you would like to talk to one of our experts, feel free to contact us today.

The post How Business Intelligence can be useful for Government agencies appeared first on Beyond Key.

Organizations deal with lots of data regularly. But in case you are not able to access or connect with that important data, you are not yielding anything. You are keeping your organizations away from getting the value. This is where Microsoft Power BI comes into play. It helps you solve this problem of Data visualization and sharing on time. In this blog, you can find some of the best Power BI Use Cases and examples that can help in your business.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is the business intelligence component of the Microsoft Power Platform, enabling users to visualize data from Dynamics NAV or Business Central instances along with many other systems, including Facebook, Google Analytics, SharePoint, and website analytics.

One of the biggest advantages of this tool is that the desktop version of the software is free, which means even small businesses on a tight budget can benefit from the visualized data.

Now let’s understand what Power BI service and its types are.

Power BI services

Power BI service is a secure Microsoft-hosted cloud service that lets users view dashboards, reports, and Power BI apps — a type of content that combines related dashboards and reports — using a web browser or via mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.

There are three types of Power BI that you will see on the Power BI pricing page:  Power BI Free or Desktop, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium. Check out our blog post: Free vs. Paid Power BI

How can use the Power BI service for my organization? What are the popular Power BI use cases?

Organizations usually ask us how we can use Power BI easily or what kind of visually appealing dashboards and reports can be created to make informed business decisions? Beyond Intranet is a Microsoft Gold partner company which is working on BI and data analytics tools and technology for the last more than a decade.

We have developed several intuitive dashboards and reports which are consumed every day with different people in the organization playing various job roles.

Here are a few of the use-cases where Power BI dashboards and reports can make a difference in the angle of seeing data.

1.Resource Management

2. Financial reporting

3. Sales scorecard

4. Claims, billing, and collection report

5. Inventory optimization

1. Resource Management

We had a leading consumer electronics manufacturer as our client who had multiple productions and device manufacturing sites in various geographical locations.

They needed a Custom BI dashboard to make better decisions on task and resource allocation. We suggested they use Power BI instead of the usual SSRS reports because of the strong visualization capabilities of Power BI. We used the Power Query and Power Pivot in Excel to generate the report. To get a complete overview of resource demand and allocation, we can track key KPIs like:

1. Number of open projects and resources allocated

2. Resources with task count

3. Skills of the resources

4. Project completion percentage

2. Financial reporting dashboards

No matter whatever business you are in, generating revenue and profit is probably your organization’s chief KPI. Tracking your finances with longstanding excel sheets or logbooks is not only difficult but confusing also. You manually keep updating the figures in the cells and eventually tend to lose track. Modern-day businesses have therefore switched to the powerful data visualization tool called Power BI.

We recently developed a PoC of a Financial reporting dashboard for one of our medical devices’ clients. With the unified dashboard, the company could easily understand their complex financial spreadsheets. The got the bird’s eye view of what’s going on with their revenue statements and could take quick decisions on cash flow and product wise sales summary data.

3. Sales Scorecard

The Sales Scorecard is one way we help people to monitor the pulse of their business. The scorecard or the dashboard helps the sales team to have a high-level understanding of what happened with the business the previous day and where things are tracking for the year.

Managers can view the complete scorecard of their team and apply required filters like comparing zone wise sales team performance.

They can slice and dice reports by looking on to the individual team member’s scorecard, product-wise performance, or even geography or time-wise sale. Sales and marketing scorecards are required in almost all types of businesses and we know that customizing it as per your need is equally important to give required output. We are open to any time of customization as well as providing you the self-service Power BI dashboards too.

4. Power BI for Claims, billing, and collection report

Speedy and effective claims handling is the basis for great customer management. Power BI can help to improve the claims management process in any industry dealing with claims. The analysis helps identify trends in claims, loss patterns, and helps reduce the risk of fraud and ineffectiveness.

The claims handlers’ team can optimize the claims and billing process, minimizing losses, and increasing customer satisfaction by speeding up the entire process. Other than this, claim cancellation and delay in the collection are two major issues that need to be addressed immediately to keep the customers satisfied and to bring the required efficiency in the process.

5. Power BI for Better Inventory Optimization

Power BI help identify stock turns, inventory-to-purchase ratio, slow-moving stock, and gross margin return on investment (GMROI) by manufacturer, device, or location.

Through these granular reports created on Power BI, the Inventory head can easily identify how much stock is available for a product. They can do the required sorting of the stock with the manufacturing and expiry dates, prices, and batch numbers.

Power BI’s inventory management dashboards provide:

• Granular reports on Overstock, Understock, and deadstock
• Insights into product/ raw material purchases and re-stocking / re-ordering
• Plans to eliminate the deadstock and bring overall efficiency with stocking
• Reports to track and monitor inventory in multiple warehouses.
• Procurement budgeting and planning across multiple warehouses

Power BI Use Cases: Final Thoughts

If you are considering the implementation of any BI platform for your business, we would advise you to at least give Microsoft Power BI by Microsoft. If anything, you can use the free desktop version which also has a lot of potentials. Even if you are facing any difficulty assessing the platform, we are here to help with our Power BI consulting services. We are your full-service BI solutions partner, assisting through all stages of the BI process from exploration to development, deployment, training, ongoing support, and ultimately your continued success.

To learn more about Power BI or our Power BI consulting Services, click the link below or contact us—we would love to help.

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The world’s economic engine relies on manufacturing to work effectively. For manufacturers to stay competitive they need a way to continue to produce cheaper goods at the highest quality possible without taking optimal use of human resources. It is a tall order and one reason, why artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing will be a foundation for achieving these goals.

The relationship between AI and manufacturing is still early. That is why it important for manufacturers to start integrating this technology today. By understanding the competition as well as having a plan, it is possible to successfully leverage AI for your enterprise.

AI in Manufacturing Trends

According to Zion Market Research, the AI in the manufacturing market will rise to $18.5 billion by the year 2025 from $1.1 Billion in 2018. That is an annual growth rate of 49.7%. over the next 5 years to reach this market size.

The question now becomes why the industry would adopt AI so quickly. A recent Microsoft report shared how AI helped manufacturing firms increase their performance by 11.5% compared to their peers.

What has the C-suite excited is the potential savings. McKinsey discovered how manufacturing companies who invest in AI could potentially double their cash flow over the next 5-7 years.

However, AI will not do this alone. Instead, it will work with other emerging technologies to create even better results.

For example, Consultancy.org discovered how embedded robots (robots that combine AI and IoT technology) have seen a 20% increase in productivity. The embedded robots supply ongoing maintenance, which ensures machines on the factory floor last longer and break less.

Brian Matthews, the Vice President of Platform Engineering at Autodesk, put it another way when he said, “it could achieve 50,000 days of engineering in one day.” These robots would not be possible a few years ago because they did not have the level of AI required to perform complex procedures.

5 Steps to Leverage AI in Manufacturing

1. Have a plan

Like most great technological advances, it is not enough to just want the trendy, innovative technology solution. The companies that benefit the most from AI have a plan.

The biggest challenge for manufacturing companies implementing AI technology in their facilities is that only 30% currently have a plan in place.

Therefore, start by researching what you want for your organization, so you can plan out your AI development in a rational way. This will help later when you need to integrate your AI technology with the rest of your software and hardware.

If you are not sure how to create a solid AI plan, then have your consulting firm help. Many Beyond Key clients come to us for AI services. Before we help them with the implementation, we work with them to create a plan that helps them realize the full potential of the applications they want to use.

2. Set a budget

Part of any good plan must include a budget. In this case, the budget is separated to address specific AI projects that relate to the plan itself. This step would happen at the same time as the plan.

However, the budget has been the end of many great AI projects. According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), 40% of executives feel this is the biggest obstacle to using AI adoption.

Set up multiple budget options that would range from bare-bones to everything on your wish list. Most organizations usually choose a budget somewhere in between.

Additionally, one of the biggest AI expenses is finding a skilled team. If you want to test the waters with AI, you might want to consider outsourcing this task to a third-party provider. Often, they can do this with fewer expenses and

If you have questions about how to begin this process, contact an AI specialist today for a free 1-hour consultation.

3. Integrate with your current technologies

After the budget and planning, your organization needs to evaluate how AI will integrate with the rest of your technology stack. Most manufacturing companies have spent decades building out their technical capabilities without considering how to implement AI.

HBR also reported that 47% of executives feel the biggest obstacle they face is integrating AI with existing systems. To get the most out of your AI initiatives, make sure that your technical team evaluates the pros and cons of different tools and systems with your current setup.

4. Communicate with employees

Employees are nervous about whether AI will replace them. According to PwC, automation and AI could replace 38% of US jobs in the next 10-15 years. Your employees read the news and hear stories about how computers will replace their jobs.

If you want to use AI in your manufacturing enterprise, you need to be transparent. Let employees know the downside and benefits of AI.

For example, embedded technology keeps systems running longer. That way, workers have fewer disruptions in their schedules. There are fewer concerns about outages and more time to work. Explaining this to employees can help you get buy-in for these projects.

5. Improve data collection efforts

AI runs on data. The revolution in data collection over the past few years has laid the framework for better AI tools in the future. However, data is only as good as those who create the framework for this data.

For example, Gartner predicts that 85% of AI projects through 2022 will have “erroneous outcomes”. The reasons range from data bias to faulty algorithms to incorrect data input.

These mistakes will slow down AI adoption. To reduce the number of errors it is necessary to start improving data collection efforts now.

Before starting on AI projects, complete a review of all data collection procedures. Make sure they help your organization make the best decisions possible now. It often helps to make the data easy to understand for all employees. Therefore, you might want to consider having Power BI dashboards where you can visualize your data in one location.

Then start using that crystal-clear data to begin creating AI tools.

AI in Manufacturing Final Thoughts

The next decade will be an interesting explosion in artificial intelligence. Enterprises in the manufacturing industry need to take advantage of it for them before their competitors do.

If your organization wants to take the first steps, let us know how Beyond Key can help. Contact us today to connect with an AI expert who can help you determine the best strategy moving forward.

The post 5 Steps to Leverage AI in Manufacturing appeared first on Beyond Key.

Non-Profits or Not for profit organizations work for the betterment of people and often operate on tight budgets. The staff is motivated by a cause rather than profits and growth. Resources are limited. That’s why they need to find the best value for their budget. Microsoft is aware of that reality and that’s why Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM solution fits in the budget of the typical non-profit organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 nonprofit can help and improve the fundraising time for them and can provide best practices to track and analyze campaigns.

A Non-Profit can achieve its goals by building relations with people who are going to put money in their pockets, whether those are customers, clients, or donors. Dynamics 365 CRM for non-profit helps engage donors on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Non-Profits

1. Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator

 Microsoft provides an out-of-the-box solution for Non-Profit organizations. The application is called “Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator”. The application contains below prebuilt features which will help a Non-Profit to have a better and more robust application:

• Pre-built dashboards
• Workflows
• Sample apps
• Templates
• Customer engagement
• Content management
• Data connectors
• Donor Profile

Microsoft offers a significant discount on its CRM app package for nonprofits.

2. Custom-built Dynamics 365 CRM

A Non-Profit organization can also have a custom-built Dynamics 365 Non-Profit CRM and we at Beyond Key can help to build it which includes all features of the Non-Profit accelerator.

Every Non-Profit organization has its own needs and workflows. Furthermore, no organization wants to change its process just to fit in the contains of the software. So, a good customizable CRM is an ideal solution for a Non-Profit organization that can improve donor relationships and streamline workflow, track event planning, fundraising, and Volunteer management. Dynamics 365 CRM experts at Beyond Key can be partners for you in this journey of customization.

How a custom-built Dynamics 365 CRM for Non-Profit Organization looks like.

a. You can Integrate many Microsoft tools to Dynamics CRM so you can access them all at same Dynamics Instance.

b. You can have access to all your custom entities and categories anytime.

c. You can create different views for entity and fields to access them directly in a single view.

d. You can create multiple dashboards, charts, views based on custom entities and fields to view how your organization is performing.

9 reasons that will help your not for profit organization to switch to Dynamics 365 CRM

1. Unified View for all departments

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM 360-degree view, you will gain a full view of what the organization offers and how it is performing.

Dynamics 365 CRM can help to manage every aspect of its operations like contacts, donations, volunteers, and memberships. Microsoft provides integration with many other applications like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Excel, etc., which users can access in the same Dynamics instance.

We can also help by integrating other third-party services that you need to connect with your Dynamics 365 CRM.

2. Manage grants seamlessly

Through Dynamics 365 CRM you can easily manage and track the complete grants process.  You can automate reminders and renewals to make sure no opportunity is missed.

3. Cultivate Donor relationships

Nonprofit Organizations need to have a good understanding of where their contributions are coming from so that they can channel their fundraising efforts effectively.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Non-Profit can actively help organizations cultivate a donor relationship. It will keep track of event attendees, Phone conversations, Email communications, and other points of contact. This will help to develop a long-term relationship.

You can run multiple campaigns at the same time and target donors with future events, follow-up emails which will help donors to remember your organization.

4. Better Volunteer allocation

Building relations with Volunteers is also a key objective of every Non-Profit Organization.

Volunteers give their time and effort to support an organization’s cause. It becomes important that anyone who contributes to a nonprofit must be carefully managed and supported.

With the help of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can easily manage and track how your volunteers are performing and allow nonprofits to assign the right volunteers to the right project.

5. Making email communications effective

Non-Profit Organizations rely upon email communications and campaigns for sending out the message of new events to their donors.  Dynamics 365 CRM helps them to manage their email campaigns effectively. Users can create custom segments of contacts for individual campaigns, enabling nonprofits to directly target former donors who may be interested in similar upcoming campaigns, or keep supporters of previous campaigns in the loop and let them know how their contribution is being utilized.

It also gives you statistics related to the campaign performance like delivered, opened, and clicked emails. This will help the organization to generate reports and have a better understanding of effectivity of the campaign pitch.

6. Improving Fundraising initiatives

With the help of Dynamics 365, CRM organizations can have a clear understanding of their donor’s behavior and source of donations. It helps to observe whether they donate frequently, occasionally, etc. Organizations can have a complete view of donor commitments and transactions. Users can track them easily and can generate reports to have a better view and understanding of fundraising initiatives.

7. Social Media Management

Social media outreach is equally important for any Non-Profit organization. They need to make a strong strategy if they want to reach more and more potential donors. Dynamics 365 CRM can easily get integrate with social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which enables users to plan, deliver, and analyze social media campaigns. Users can schedule posts in Dynamics CRM for social media channels for any future events.

8. Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft offers many different Power Applications which easily connect to Dynamics 365 CRM Few applications are:

Power BI – Integration with Power BI allows organizations to view insightful reports and dashboards.

Power Apps – Power Apps allows organizations to build many different applications as per their need without much technical and code knowledge.

Power Automate – With the help of Power Automate organizations can create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and save time.

9. Pricing

The best part of Dynamics 365 CRM is its cost-effectivity. Microsoft offers discounted rates for non-profit organizations if they are good with their eligibility criteria:

Some of the popular plans for NPOs are:

Customer Engagement Enterprise Apps Price: $23.80 user/month

Includes online and on-premises dual-use for Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and Project Service Automation. Further discounts are available when purchasing multiple apps.

Dynamics 365 Team Members Price: $1.80 user/month

Includes light use of Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and PowerApps business applications plus online and on-premise dual rights use.

Final Thoughts

Experts at Beyond Key are aware of the significant difference Dynamics 365 can make to a Non-Profit organization, streamlining their workflow, and improving donor relationships. With expenses reduced, more funding can be directed towards actively making a change in the world. To learn more about what Beyond Key can do for your Non-Profit organization, please contact us at contact@beyondkey.com.

The post How Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Benefits Not for Profit Organization appeared first on Beyond Key.

Dynamics 365 was created to help organizations with four digital transformation outcomes. These outcomes are: optimize operations, transform products, empower employees, and engage customers. To help organizations with these transformation outcomes, Microsoft Dynamics has 11 core modules. Dynamics 365 modules give organizations the flexibility to improve whatever specific outcome(s) they want to achieve. When used correctly, the modules can have an almost magical effect on whatever outcome you target.

Digital Transformation Outcomes

We mentioned above the four transformational outcomes for dynamics 365. To understand how Dynamics 365 modules can help your organization, here is a short explanation of what each outcome does for your organization.

Here are the goals for these outcomes.

Optimize operations– How efficient is your organization? How fast can you deliver your product or service in the most cost-effective manner possible? Companies’ ability to streamline expenses and maximize revenue is what keeps some companies from failing during downturns while others thrive.

Transform products-Innovation is important for any organization today. Therefore, companies need to have ways to continually improve their product to keep up with market standards and customer expectations.

Empower employees– Organizations need to engage and respect their employees, or it will be almost impossible to effectively execute any operations or customer strategy.

Engage customers– Customers are the lifeblood of any company. That is why it is important to make sure that marketing, sales, and customer service work together to create a seamless customer experience.

What are the Different Dynamics 365 Modules?

Before we talk about how to reach specific outcomes, we need to discuss the 11 core Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules.

The 11 core modules are:

a. Sales– an AI-powered CRM

b. Customer Service– support desk tools for inbound calls, emails, social, chat, and text

c. Field Service– support tool for a technical team making outbound service trips

d. Human Resources– full employee management system (hiring, PTO tracking, etc.)

e. Finance and Operations– financial and payroll tracking

f. Commerce– connects in-store, eCommerce, inventory, and customer loyalty campaigns

g. Project Service Automation– project management tool helps streamline the process

h. Marketing– client communication tool with personalization and automation features

i. Artificial Intelligence– business intelligence insights

j. Mixed Reality– an exciting new module that includes remote assist, augmented reality, and product visual features to combine real-life elements and digital

k. Business Central– This ERP provides a pre-packaged solution with several modules.

Three Different Ways to Create Dynamics 365 Modules Magic

1. ERP

Business Central is the ready-to-use integrated Dynamics 365 Module package for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB). The tool is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool, which combines multiple software products into one large service.

Microsoft designated its Business Central ERP to help organizations manage their finances, human resources, supply chain, and manufacturing in one central location. Every SMB wants to find the best value for the lowest price. The challenge is that many end up adding multiple services that do not work together.

Companies waste countless hours trying to get everything to work together. Some companies end up spending on developers to patching the system together than they do on the ERP.

Also, maintenance is a huge issue when you don’t have a comprehensive system because whenever a service updates or upgrades its software, it could ruin the previous setup.

An ERP provides an easy turnkey solution for companies who just want it done for them. Furthermore, Microsoft’s Business Central helps companies who want to

2. Mix Dynamic 365 Module with each other

What happens if you want multiple services, but not the entire ERP?

For example, maybe you want to use the Marketing and Sales modules to unify your prospecting efforts. While it might make sense to add a financial and even an HR module, the question then becomes do you need mixed reality, artificial intelligence, or field service.

If you find it best to use certain modules and save money on the entire ERP, this is possible with Microsoft Dynamics 365. You can even integrate certain parts of Dynamics 365 with other tools in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

We have worked with several companies that combined Dynamics 365 with the Power Platform. The Power Platform includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Virtual Agent.

Here is a likely scenario. A company uses the Financial module to improve its operations. They integrate their reporting with Power BI to give a complete picture of the company’s financials over the past week, month, quarter, or year.

3. Integrate Dynamics 365 Modules with third-party tools

Finally, Dynamics 365 also work with third-party tools through APIs, SQL Server tables, and the Microsoft AppSource.

The AppSource has 2384 apps, as of this article, to add additional features from a variety of third-party developers to your Dynamics 365 modules.

For example, there are 538 results for Dynamics 365 sales apps including DocuSign, MailChimp, Salesgenie, WebEx, and Hootsuite.

We discussed earlier the value of having one system to work together, which is why Microsoft is committed to integrating their solution with other business tools to ensure companies have all the integrations they need to reach their digital transformation outcomes.

Final Thoughts

Every organization has its own needs moving forward. That is why one solution cannot provide all the answers. Instead, it is important to have flexibility. Microsoft 365 modules help you reach your digital outcomes.

If you have any questions about how to use Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, let us know how we can help. Set up a free 1-hour consultation with one of our Dynamics 365 experts today.

The post Dynamics 365 Modules: The best integrations to help your organizations appeared first on Beyond Key.

Everywhere we look, data is present. There is data being used even as you read this blog. To put it into perspective, the planet contains about 400,000 bytes of data for each grain of sand. Humans are using data to make better decisions in every sector of society now more than ever. And data analytics is revolutionizing how we interpret this already-existing data. Data analytics as a holy grail is used in every industry, from improvements in healthcare to sports team tactics. But what about data analytics for nonprofits? 

Data Analytics For Nonprofits: A Perfect Bond 

The competition between nonprofits having similar missions and purposes increases as the nonprofit sector expands and thrives. Many nonprofit organizations experience growing discomforts as they aim to retain more valuable donors who frequently give as they develop over time. If you’re a nonprofit looking to achieve that goal, you need to strengthen your bonds with your supporters and provide them with better services. But how? With data analytics! 

Understanding your supporters’ interests, preferences, and behaviors is possible by having useful data about them. Consider sending email and direct mail appeals as an example. According to the data from both channels, email appeals are more effective at looking for supporters to help your cause and raise money for it. You send more email appeals going forward and spend less money on the less effective communication channel because you have concrete proof that your supporters prefer email communication. That is one of the many ways how data analytics powers nonprofits. 

Let’s talk about a few reasons why data analytics can benefit your nonprofit. 

4 Data Analytics Types That Are Beneficial To Nonprofit Organizations 

Every nonprofit’s daily operations include making decisions and solving problems. Imagine being able to reduce both the time and effort necessary to complete them. To do this, what if I told you that you only required the correct data? 

Analytical tools won’t replace your ability to think intuitively. The core of nonprofit work has always been and will continue to be years of experience and interpersonal connections. Data analytics, however, can serve as a compass for you and your business. It can assist in reviewing campaign performance, enhancing donor communications, and boosting productivity. 

Data has the potential to be a practical addition to your work, giving you the information you need to make wiser choices. These data analytics types benefit nonprofits massively.

 1. Analytics Of Projections

• Identifies trends in data to predict future outcomes.
• Can aid in resource allocation and budgetary adjustments. 

 2. Digestive Analytics

• Draws connections between the variables while analyzing various data to shed light on why something occurred. 
• May respond to inquiries about external factors, campaign effectiveness, etc. 

3. Detailed Analytics

• Provides a thorough look at events that occurred during a specific time.
• Provides information on changes and complete comparison between two points in time. 

4. Constructive Analytics

• Predicts outcomes and suggests actions using machine learning.
• Improves perceptions of the risks and advantages of specific actions by allowing nonprofits to encourage potential outcomes. 

Why Use Data Analytics for Nonprofits? 

In the bustling world of nonprofits, data analytics is more than just a trend – it’s a lifeline. It’s about turning raw data into meaningful insights that can propel your organization forward. Here’s why data analytics is indispensable for your nonprofit: 

• Boosting Supporter Engagement: Data analytics can reveal patterns and trends in your supporters’ behavior, helping you to optimize your outreach efforts and strengthen your relationships with them. 
• Enhancing Fundraising Efforts: By analyzing the success of past campaigns, you can fine-tune your strategies to maximize the impact of your fundraising efforts. 
• Ensuring Accountability: Data analytics can provide transparency and evidence of your nonprofit’s impact, which is crucial for maintaining trust with your supporters, stakeholders, and the communities you serve. 
• Forecasting Future Campaigns: Leveraging predictive analytics can help you anticipate future trends and prepare your organization to seize new opportunities. 

However, to unlock the full potential of data analytics, it’s crucial to focus on the right metrics, establish a robust process for data collection and analysis, and maintain data accuracy and consistency. By doing so, your nonprofit can navigate challenges more effectively and amplify its impact. 

Data Analytics For Nonprofits: A Closer Look at Key Metrics 

Let’s walk through some crucial data metrics and see how they can revolutionize the way your nonprofit operates. 

Social Media: Social media platforms significantly enhance nonprofits’ reach and visibility, facilitating volunteer attraction and pro bono consultations. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide unique tools for fundraising and awareness drives. By understanding each platform’s features and audience, nonprofits can optimize their content and strategies. Tracking metrics like reach, engagement, and conversions allows for strategy refinement, making social media an effective tool for achieving nonprofit goals. 

Email Analytics: Email isn’t just a communication tool, it’s your nonprofit’s engagement powerhouse! With email analytics, you can understand and inspire your supporters more effectively. Monitor key metrics like open rates and click-throughs to fine-tune your messaging and calls-to-action. It’s not just about sending emails; it’s about sparking meaningful interactions and driving action for your cause. So, let’s turn data into insight and emails into impactful conversations. Your mission deserves it! 

Fundraising and Donor Analytics: This is where you delve into the heart of what drives your supporters. Imagine being able to identify trends in donation frequency or amounts. Or better yet, understanding your donor retention rate to tailor your communication and recognition strategies to keep your supporters feeling valued and engaged. 

Business and Financial Analytics: These metrics serve as the health check for your nonprofit. They help you track revenue and expenditures, ensuring your nonprofit stays financially healthy and sustainable. More importantly, they allow you to make data-driven decisions, like where to allocate resources for maximum impact. 

Remember, each metric is not just a number – it’s a story about your nonprofit, your supporters, and your impact. And with data analytics, you’re the storyteller who can turn these insights into action. 

How to Use Data for Your Organization Effectively 

Leverage the power of data and analytics to truly transform your mission delivery and impact. Measure what matters and make data-driven decisions to: 

Raise more funds and increasedonor retention
Fundraising and donor management software paired with analytics can reveal your highest potential donor segments, most effective fundraising channels, and key drivers of donor loyalty. 

Optimize program outcomes
Data on client demographics, needs and outcomes helps you spot where to refine interventions for maximum impact.

Improve operational efficiency
Financial and HR data shows where to cut costs, boost productivity and streamline processes.

Enhance stakeholder engagement
Analyze web, social media and survey feedback to give supporters the compelling content and experiences they crave.

It starts with the right technology – analyze financials, donor info, grant data, outcomes and more on a single integrated platform. Then apply analytics to reveal opportunities, spot trends, identify outliers and predict future performance.

Modifications that your nonprofit data analytics organization can make

Compliance with regulations

Nonprofits must abide by laws that specify the categories of data they may collect, how they may use it, and what they must report. Organizations can use business intelligence to collect, arrange, and analyze data, create reports, and adhere to regulations. 

Gaining a global perspective on everything from staffing and asset management to fundraising and forecasting: Analytics can be used in all these ways to help organizations gain a global perspective on everything. Analytical tools can give organizations access to new data sources and help them combine and make sense of the data they already have. This gives them a level of insight into their operations that was not possible before. 

Enterprise Reporting

For many organizations, the challenge isn’t lack of data, but lack of access to the data they require at the right time. Data is spread across numerous repositories and applications, so finding the “source of truth” requires a titanic manual effort. Enterprise reporting tools enable organizations to combine various data sources into a single data model and obtain a comprehensive picture of operations without sifting through different data silos. They can learn more about the people using their goods and services and the methods they employ. 

Nonprofits can make plans by looking at internal and external data from the past. They can identify patterns, deal with problems moving forward, and set objectives that outperform historical metrics with analytics. 

Users can visualize data using customizable dashboards’ graphs, charts, and animation. Managers can build interactive dashboards, execute queries, and pull reports according to their requirements. They can drill down to provide previously unattainable insight into operations. 

Forecasting and budgeting

The annual spreadsheet shuffle has become a dreaded but necessary reality for nonprofits. Data from various departments, systems, and people are being gathered through an all-hands-on-deck process. The challenge of managing budgeting, forecasting, and planning through numerous unsynchronized spreadsheets can be removed with nonprofit data analytics tools. They streamline communication and centralize the data, enabling complex planning and analysis through “what-if” modeling. Organizations can track advancement toward goals in real time, thanks to integrated reports and score carding. 

Analytics-Driven Planning 

Use analytics to study past data, identify patterns, manage future challenges, and set ambitious goals. Create customizable dashboards with interactive charts and graphs to visualize your data. 

Fundraising and focused outreach

Since fundraising is essential to nonprofits, it must be handled with care. An organization will experience budget gaps if it devotes insufficient resources to fundraising. If there are too many, revenue may be adversely affected. Courting potential large donors take a lot of work, but blanket mailings can be expensive and ineffective. 

The most likely donors need to focus on organizations’ outreach efforts and campaigns. Which prospects are most likely to respond can be pinpointed with a high degree of accuracy using predictive analytics. Using these tools can help organizations cut down on their overall marketing and outreach costs while prioritizing personal outreach to get the most out of it. 

3 Unique Nonprofit Data Analytics Uses Cases 

1. Intuitive BI visuals to improve employee productivity 

The Client

A community-based organization in Australia that offers exceptional peer-to-peer support and personal development programs to assist fellow Australians in recovering from mental illness.  

The Challenge

The issue was that the Australian NPF client used some external programs, including Folio, 3CX, MS Teams, MS One Drive, and SharePoint. They had purchased licenses for these tools for internal use but also wanted to understand if their staff found them helpful. They also needed better user analytics to increase technology adoption within their organization. 

Since numerous tools produce data every day, the NPO found it difficult to purge the data and delete unnecessary files. To create an appropriate relational data module, they also needed to combine the data in a structured manner. The system had to produce reports comparing how different tools were used. These reports were later transformed into clear visuals for use in business decision-making. 

The Solution

After carefully examining the available data sources and architecture, Beyond Key decided to take some immediate action.  

The client received a system that is strong on visuals to help them understand how their staff is performing using the technology they bought. 

Because of the new data architecture, they no longer had to manually extract reports from Folio. This saved them time and money. 

Read more about the Data Architecture and BI Visual

2. BI – EHR integration optimizes clinic performance and patient care strategies

The Client

Los Angeles-based nonprofit health care center with a network of community health clinics that serves patients of all ages. To promote a holistic approach to patients’ well-being, they also offer services to address patients’ educational, socioeconomic, and housing needs in addition to regular healthcare services. 

The Challenge

The client wanted to integrate their Electronic Health Records (EHR) system with both SharePoint and the Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard to display data. They also wanted reports, but not at the expense of EHR downtime. 

The Solution

The client hired Beyond Key to assist them in producing reports that can be useful to representatives from various departments. The Board members used these reports to make smarter decisions. 

• We also created tabular reports with data, graphs, images, and charts using the SQL server reporting services. 
• Additionally, we produced pivot charts for sophisticated analytics and Excel reports for data visualization. 
• We generated reports using one-day-old data to ensure their EHR performance was not impacted. 
• We also assisted them in producing Grant reports for the relevant government agencies. 

Read more about the BI For Healthcare

3. Building Advanced Analytical Reports for USA’s Nonprofit

The Client

They are among the most reputable American providers of reproductive healthcare. Millions of women, men, and young people worldwide receive critical reproductive healthcare and information from this nonprofit healthcare center. 

The Challenge

Large amounts of raw data, including patient personal information, insurance information, booked appointment times and open slots, walk-in reports, follow-up times, reminder date information, and various clinical reports, were poured upon management and clinicians. They wanted information on the appointments made by patients at multiple clinics and the open slots so that their administration could accommodate more patients for these slots. To do this, they wanted to include cutting-edge BI and data visualization tools. 

The Solution

They collaborated with Beyond Key to create a SharePoint and business intelligence (BI)-based software. This software could read huge amounts of data from different health centers and other sources and turn them into meaningful data insights that could be shown on dashboards to help management, doctors, and patients. 

The procedure helped the company in many ways, which helped them make better use of their resources across all of their 20+ health centers. 

Read more about the Advanced Analytical Report

Beyond Key gave these organizations the chance to make their dreams come true while managing project requirements and deadlines in a respectful way. Learn more about our Data Analytics Use Cases

Future of Data Analytics For Nonprofits 

There is a move toward a data architecture that is more cloud-native. Nonprofits are switching from the investment in data lakes made in the previous decade to more structured, cloud-based data warehouses. The real return on investment (ROI) in a cloud-native stack will speed up access to data to guide daily decisions for nonprofit organizations. 

The improvement of data collection and analysis process automation results from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) growth. Strong analytical tools and an environment for data that is becoming more open have made it easier for nonprofits to get sharper insights.  

Additionally, Data pipelines will make it simpler for nonprofits to deliver updates in real-time to the warehouse. Data can be formatted instantly using analytics engineering and transformation tools. Data observability and quality monitoring platforms are surfacing to increase the dependability of sensitive SaaS and web data. Nonprofits can operate more quickly and with greater assurance by getting data where decisions are made more quickly. 

AI enables nonprofit professionals to quickly personalize their communications by tailoring email content and tone to a particular audience. As a result, relationships with donors and volunteers will become even more potent. The days of donors receiving the same email at the same time are long gone. 

With the right data reports, you can also identify which channels your supporters are communicating and interacting with most and how long they are engaging with your organization. 

But if you don’t have the data, none of this matters. It is the underlying component that gives intelligent technology its strength. Data collection and storage are more important than ever for the nonprofit sector’s success. 

Organizations can now take the most of the technological technology in the nonprofit segment. Microsoft is one of the many providers of cloud-based solutions that are revolutionizing the nonprofit segment completely. 

Conclusion

There is a high demand for the excellent work done by nonprofits, but making the best use of donations and community support requires wise decisions to help ensure the efficient allocation of funding and resources. 

Robust data analytics enable this. With Beyond Key’s data analytics solutions, nonprofits are better positioned to find essential connections and streamline ongoing operations. This will pave the course for their future expansion when equipped with efficient data analytics solutions and strategies. Request a demo here if you’re ready to unleash the power of data analytics for nonprofits. 

The post How Does Data Analytics Boost Nonprofits? appeared first on Beyond Key.

In today’s world, there is more voice-based communication and collaboration happening than ever. People are no longer only typing now. They have speech-to-text transcription applications on their smart devices that allow them to transcribe everything they say. While speech recognition and transcription isn’t a new phenomenon, they have undergone a great deal of transformation over the years. The players in this domain who have been working hard in making this happen have achieved a great deal of accuracy in the technology recently.

There are several systems available that differ in capabilities, with some only able to recognize a selection of words and phrases. But the most advanced transcription software can understand natural speech and also provide its own accuracy measure. Yes, we’re talking about the speech-to-text capabilities of four big players: IBM Watson, Google Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe, and Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text.

Speech-to-text transcription technology has allowed developers to power voice response systems virtually everywhere, from call centers to financial institutions, hospitals to education institutes. Developers can also enable the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to talk back to users and convert text-based media into a spoken format. Businesses have started finding the best possible use case of speech-to-text technology in their own scenarios and leveraging the capability of these giants who are increasingly interested in bringing their Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to the enterprise.

At Beyond Key, our voice technology expert Vishal Gupte dove deep to find out which of the four players carved the niche and offered the best version of this technology. To understand it better, let’s take a look at the matrix below which gives a quick glimpse of the features offered by each of these companies:

Features	IBM Watson	Google Speech-to-Text	Amazon Transcribe	Azure Speech-to-Text API
Speech Recognition
Real-time Speech Recognition			–
Keyword Spotting in Audio		–	–	–
Speaker Identification		Beta		–
Languages Supported	English (US), English (UK), Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, French, Korean	120 languages and variants	English(US) and Spanish	Different languages are supported for different Speech service functions; total of 30 languages supported as of now
Multichannel Recognition	–			–
Accuracy
Confidence Score	(word wise)	(word wise)	(word wise)	(transcription wise)
Start/End Time per Word				–
Noise Robustness	–		–	–
Vocabulary
Custom Vocabulary		(known as phrase hints)
Profanity Filtering			–	–
Smart Formatting
Punctuation		(Beta)
Support
Video Support	–			–
Audio Formats Supported	WebM with the Opus or Vorbis codec, MP3, WAV, FLAC, PCM, u-law audio, and basic audio	All audio formats	FLAC, MP3, MP4, or WAV file format	WAV
REST API Support
Account & Pricing
New Account Needed	IBM Cloud Account	Cloud Platform Account	AWS Account	Azure Account
Free Trail	30 minutes for 30 days (Lite Plan)	0-60 minutes free	60 minutes per month for 12 months	5 hours per month
Pricing	$0.02 USD/minute	Over 60 minutes, up to 1 million minutes Audio: $0.006 USD /15 seconds Video: $0.012 USD /15 seconds	$0.0004 USD per second	$1 USD per hour

Real-Time Speech Recognition

IBM Watson, Google Speech-to-Text and Azure Speech-to-Text have been found to be the most powerful in recognizing speech in real time. While using the Amazon Transcribe API, you can analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech as a whole.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text conversion is powered by machine learning. Its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is powered by deep learning neural networking, making it work with more accuracy in real-time.

IBM Watson is also good at keyword spots when working in real-time. It has a highly accurate speech engine. It recognizes different speakers in your audio and spots specified keywords in real-time with high accuracy and confidence. The service leverages artificial intelligence to transcribe the human voice accurately. It identifies the composition of the audio signal with the help of information about grammar and language structure. With the machine learning skills embedded, it also continuously updates the transcription as more speech is heard.

Multiple Speakers and Channel Recognition

IBM Watson and Transcribe both have shown a good response when multiple speakers are involved in any conversation. While Cloud Speech-to-Text has included this feature in its Beta release, Watson has started giving labels to different speakers. Amazon Transcribe also recognizes when the speaker changes and attributes the transcribed text appropriately. This can significantly reduce the amount of work needed to transcribe audio with multiple speakers for telephone calls, meetings, and television shows.Amazon Transcribe and Cloud Speech-to-Text are also built to recognize multiple channels. Whether speakers are connected to the conference through an audio, video, or any other channel, the system identifies each channel and produces a single transcript with annotated channel labels. Both IBM Watson and Google Cloud Speech-to-Text are well trained in understanding audio from phone calls and videos.

Transcription: How it Works

Understanding Languages

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is the best when it comes to language supports. It recognizes 120 languages and variants. You can also filter inappropriate content in text results for all languages. While IBM Watson is trained to understand 9 languages, Azure Speech-to-Text can do it for 30 and Transcribe is still learning with just two languages. Similar to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, IBM Watson can also identify and point out profanity text.

Building Custom Vocabulary

Another important component of speech-to-text transcribing systems is getting trained or accustomed to supporting a particular business model. Luckily, all four systems have this excellent ability to train the software with custom vocabulary.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text has a feature called Phrase Hints. This feature allows you to train your speech-to-text engine to understand custom words and phrases that are likely to be spoken. This is especially useful when the application is used for a technical use-case such as in hospitals, courtrooms, call centers, research labs, and more.

Transcribe also gives you the ability to expand the base vocabulary of the application with new words and generate highly-accurate transcriptions specific to your use cases, including product names, domain-specific terminology, and names of individuals.

IBM Watson’s Speech-to-Text service helps you go deeper than out-of-the-box solutions by providing the tooling and functionality to train Watson to learn the language of your business. New language model customization, customization weighting, and acoustic model customization features provide the flexibility you need to create effective solutions for your unique domain needs.

Azure Speech-to-text also allows for the creation of custom language models tailored to users’ speaking styles, industry expressions, and technical, geographical or market terms. Through integration with Language Understanding (LUIS), you can derive intents and entities from speech. Users don’t have to know your app’s vocabulary but can describe what they want in their own words.

Punctuation and Formatting

While all the systems claim to have developed an accurate punctuation ability, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text has recently worked on a new punctuation model. Google promises that its new model results in far more readable transcriptions that feature fewer run-on sentences and more commas, periods and question marks.

Amazon Transcribe uses deep learning to add punctuation and formatting automatically so that the output is more intelligible and can be used without any further editing. The system improves its accuracy with each use and training.

IBM Watson has worked on punctuation, as well as formatting needs. It can easily convert dates, times, numbers, phone numbers, and currency values into more readable, conventional forms in final transcripts of U.S. English audio.

Azure Speech-to-Text is tailored to work well with real-life speech and can accurately transcribe proper nouns (such as Sundar Pichai) and appropriately format language (such as dates and phones numbers).

Accuracy

A great feature all of these systems share is that they have the capability to measure their own accuracy of the transcription. While IBM Watson, Cloud Speech-to-Text and Amazon Transcribe have the ability to generate a Confidence Score for every single word, Azure’s Confidence Score is returned back from the service if you specify a detailed output on the speech configuration object.

Other than this, the new and improved Cloud Speech-to-Text API promises significantly improved voice recognition performance. The new API promises a reduction in word errors of about 54 percent across all of Google’s tests, but in some areas, the results are even better.

Amazon Transcribe is designed to provide accurate and automated transcripts for a wide range of audio quality. You can generate subtitles for any video or audio file, and even transcribe low-quality telephone recordings, such as customer service calls.

Noise Robustness

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is the only system developed to handle noisy audio or background noise from many environments without requiring additional noise cancellation.

Similarly, with IBM Watson you can expect control of background noise to some extent with custom acoustic models and match your users’ expected environments.

Big Picture Benefit

The biggest benefit of all of these cloud providers is that they provide APIs which are platform independent and can directly be used to integrate with any platform of tools and services on which they run. Necessary to mention here is all four players are providing their cloud APIs. Techies have already started leveraging these capabilities into timesaving apps for a range of uses, including call center analytics, video indexing services, web conference indexing, and business transcription workflows.

Development Support

Amazon Transcribe enables developers to submit transcription requests via a standard REST interface which supports several formats, including WAV, MP3, MP4 and FLAC. It does, however, require Amazon S3 URL, so all files (audio/video) should be saved on S3 first. Then call “StartTranscriptionJob” AP, with S3 URL in “MediaFileUri” parameter.

For Azure Speech-to-Text API, developers can access it from any app using a REST API. In addition, Microsoft developed several client libraries to improve integration with various apps written in C#, Java, JavaScript and Objective-C. In some cases, client apps use the WebSocket protocol to improve performance. Currently, the service supports 29 languages, as well as WAV and Opus audio formats.

Google Cloud supports audio formats such as FLAC, AMR, PCMU and WAV files. Also, SDKs are available for C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby.

The IBM Watson Speech-to-Text service provides APIs that use IBM’s speech-recognition capabilities to produce transcripts of spoken audio. The audio format supported is WebM with the Opus or Vorbis codec, MP3, WAV, FLAC, PCM, u-law audio, and basic audio.For most languages, the service supports two sampling rates: broadband and narrowband. It returns all JSON response content in the UTF-8 character set.

For speech recognition, the service supports synchronous and asynchronous HTTP Representational State Transfer (REST) interfaces. It also supports a WebSocket interface that provides a full-duplex, low-latency communication channel (clients send requests and audio to the service and receive results over a single connection asynchronously).

Who’s the Best?

Although speech-to-text technology has not been perfected yet, we still see a great opportunity open for all four players in this technology. It’s a close call when it comes to developing custom vocabulary and training these applications with machine learning and deep learning skills. All the players have done a great job and are improving day by day. Still, if we want to choose one amongst the four, clearly Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is our first choice. Although some features like “Speaker Detection” and “Multichannel Recognition” are still in Beta with Cloud Speech-to-Text, these features work perfectly with IBM Watson and Amazon Transcribe. As far as accuracy is concerned, Google Speech API produces quite remarkable transcriptions for audio fragments even with considerable background noise. Their language support, punctuation, phrase hints, and many other features have definitely surpassed others in the race.

This conclusion is valid based on information and testing done on date for Speech-to-text technology only. This can change in the coming weeks or months or years, as every provider i.e. Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google etc. are working extensively on improving this with advancement in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. The intense research and development by each of the company brings value to the developer working on it, and also helps to create more convenient tools and applications for the masses. We are open for feedback from anyone and we would be glad to update our findings and release new findings soon.

To conclude, developers have a huge benefit here. These AI-infused speech-to-text apps have created a complete path for developers to build dictation applications that can automatically generate transcriptions for audio files, as well as captions for video files. They should incorporate these tools into workflows that complement human transcribers.

Looking for a transcription solution?

Have a business use case which you want to implement on Voice technology? You are at the right place! Contact us now to discuss your project.

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