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Andy McLean

Escape Excel Hell: Move Beyond Spreadsheets to Smarter, Trusted Decisions

By Andy McLean / November 11, 2025

Where We Went Wrong with Excel For decades, Excel has been the quiet workhorse of business life. It has modelled finances, tracked sales, forecast demand and helped managers make sense of the numbers. But somewhere along the way, that helpful spreadsheet evolved into something far more dangerous – a sprawling maze of formulas, links and…

Harnessing DevOps for Business Intelligence and Power BI

By Andy McLean / June 17, 2025

Many organisations rely on data to steer critical decisions – but delivering trustworthy, up-to-date insight is rarely simple. Reports built in silos, manual deployment steps and inconsistent testing can slow down delivery and undermine trust. This is where applying DevOps principles to Business Intelligence (BI) makes a real difference. Already well known in software development…

Why a Data Warehouse is Critical to Realising the Full Potential of Power BI 

By Andy McLean / April 17, 2025

For organisations that rely on Power BI, the advantages are clear: fast visualisation, intuitive analysis and accessible insights. But despite Power BI’s proven strengths, many businesses underestimate the critical role of their underlying data architecture. A common pitfall is treating Power BI as a standalone solution – connecting directly to disparate sources without an organised,…

From Excel Hell to Fabric Frustration – Exploring the Stages of a Typical Data Journey

By Andy McLean / February 12, 2025

Here at Circyl, helping businesses of all sizes and sectors achieve their goals through the strategic use of technology is what we do. Every business we meet is on its own unique data journey, and one of our first tasks at the start of a new partnership is to assess the current level of data…

Delivering Trusted and Scalable Analytics: Why a Centralised Data Platform is Essential for Maximising the use of Power BI

By Andy McLean / February 5, 2025

Over the last decade, Power BI has emerged as a market leader for visualising data and making data-driven decisions. While Power BI’s intuitive user experience has helped reduce the dependency on IT teams to create reports, many organisations still struggle to unlock its full potential because they lack a consistent way of centralising data from…

Excel Hell – is an over-reliance on spreadsheets costing your business time and money?

By Andy McLean / August 12, 2024

Share on Facebook 𝕏 Share on X Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Share on Email An increasing number of businesses are recognising the benefits of using data to influence decision-making – it has become a differentiator across all industries as thriving organisations look to take their business strategies to the next level. With more…

Microsoft Fabric: Data Analytics re-imagined as Microsoft unveil their new AI-inspired service

By Andy McLean / June 6, 2023

Share on Facebook 𝕏 Share on X Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Share on Email Critical to the discovery of performance-enhancing insights, common datasets with an organisation now have a tremendous influence over the decision-making processes within many businesses, as significant time and resources are actively invested into analysis and reporting. Now, as we…

Supporting SMC throughout its data journey

By Andy McLean / February 18, 2022

Share on Facebook 𝕏 Share on X Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Share on Email Business Intelligence and Productivity solutions provider, Circyl, has started 2022 strongly by adding a global manufacturer of pneumatics technology and solutions to its extensive client portfolio. With over 20,000 employees across 500 offices in 83 different countries, SMC Corporation…

Why choose Power BI? The top seven benefits of implementing the popular Business Intelligence solution

By Andy McLean / September 23, 2021

Share on Facebook 𝕏 Share on X Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Share on Email As organisations begin to recognise the importance of harnessing data to uncover business-enhancing insights, many rush to implement sophisticated Power BI solutions that will help them process information and build engaging reports. Frequent readers of our blog will be…

Power BI Premium per user could be the flexible licensing option your business needs

By Andy McLean / July 15, 2021

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Share on Email The benefits of Power BI have been well-documented in our previous blogs, but readers are perhaps less familiar with the topic of Power BI licensing and the options that are available to them. One such option is Power BI Premium…