Interactive Workshops

“The style of the delivery is very simple, to the point with no much details. Very valuable resources"

“Great delivery, new concepts, and expertise I wasn’t aware of. It’s practical and It also gave useful feedback on practical work”

About The Instructor

Ahmed Emad is a professional data visualization expert and the founder of Powerful Insights.

Ahmed has been dedicatedly developing business intelligence projects in the Middle East. One of his best projects was crafted when he was joining SAP as Performance Analytics Consultant, where he developed a set of 10 end to end BI projects using SAP BI tools; two of them won SAP bronze quality award.

Empowered with over 10 years of experience in visualizing data, Ahmed is utilizing his long experience and wide knowledge to boost business ROIs using the powers of visualizing data. He believes that transforming regular reports into perfectly visualized ones can be a turning point for the future of every business. His goal is to spread such powerful solution among those whose jobs include communicating with data.

Story

After graduating with a Bachelor of Computer Science in 2006, I Joined “Mobinil” as a customer service representative in the corporate call center department. Attempting to move to another department, I worked hard till I was ranked the best agent on top of 80 agents in my first quarter. I continued to be ranked from the top 10 for 5 consecutive quarters till I eventually moved to the corporate sales department, and that’s where the story begins.

3 Hours to 1 Minute

In this department, they used to exert too much time and effort to produce the manual reports needed daily. Among these reports was a dashboard that must be sent to the director in the early morning of each day, but it was never there on time. “There must be an easier and faster way to do so!” A thought that led me to craft an automated tool that substituted all the manual steps, and accordingly turns a 3-hour task into a 1-minute job!

The management were amazed, they recognized how effective that tool was. Moreover, the performance of the team were boosted, it took them few minutes to finalize the needed report instead of all the hassle and unnecessary hard work. And finally, there is no delay in submitting daily reports on time.

“Where Should I Look First?”

In 2012, I got the chance to join “SAP” as a data visualization consultant. Being a part of one of the top software companies in the world, I was always in a mission of impressing my Argentinean manager; and my advanced dashboards was my tool to achieve so. “Where should I look first?” surprisingly, that was his reaction on seeing them. I was shocked. I didn’t know what is exactly wrong with my dashboard that I thought they were super. He suggested reading a book called “Show me the numbers” for Stephen Few and his reply was, “read the book and come back with the answer”. I read that book and I continued reading others and others, and these readings were a turning point in my data visualization journey.

That journey of exploring more and digging deeper into the theoretical part of data visualization was such an eye-opening one. It totally shifted my perception about data visualization and introduced me to the real keys of creating a stunning reports. And I finally got clues about the secrets of crafting a perfect dashboard.

“This is Exactly What I Want”

Another turning point was when I assigned to the task of applying presales activities for customers to convince them to purchase SAP products and services. In one of my visits to a customer who was struggling to find a solution to track his team's performance, and instead of presentation slides and usual sales tool, I showed him a strategically designed dashboard where all the benefits and features of our proposed solution were clearly and shortly displayed. He started to share his KPIs within the dashboard while his eyes were shining with triumph; “this is exactly what I want” he reacted.

Right from that moment, I realized that what I'm doing is not just smartly presenting data, its way beyond that. Visualizing data is the art of crafting reports in a way that allows decision makers to see where their business stands right now, where it is going and what the right steps to do next is. Since then, I assigned myself to the mission of empowering all decision makers with such powerful insights.