Monday, May 5, 2014

Real Life BI: Time Saving Benefits of Jet Enterprise

One of our clients recently implemented Jet Enterprise in their organization to improve reporting on a third-party Dynamics GP module.

They had previously used both Crystal Reports and SSRS; however, neither enabled the client's finance and engineer users the ability to easily create and maintain their own reports.

So, on to the story...

A finance user was struggling with filtering a report and producing the same results as an existing custom SRS report.  Part of the problem practically, is that a number of tables, unions (i.e. between open and historical data) and joins (i.e. to link the tables together) needed to be understood and configured properly before adding the filter.

I have no idea exactly how many hours this finance user had poured into creating this report; however, I do know that from the time she reached out to me via email to ask for help, to the time I received an email back saying that the report was working was nearly instantaneous.

What did I tell her?  I can tell you that I did not give her a crash course in table buliding, report building or anything of the sort, I simply said the following:

"Have you considered using Jet Enterprise for this? You already have the data summarized there. It would just need the filter."

That was all that was needed.  Simple, quick and accurate since the third-party data was already configured in an MS cube in an easy to use tool in full accordance to Kimball's best practices in dimensional modeling. 

If you or your organization are interested in leaving the office early, contact me.

Dilbert on Big Data

Big Data is definately here to stay, but as Dilbert points out below the ethics of Big Data analysis also need to be considered.