Dilbert on Why Self-Service Reporting, BI & Analytics Takes Faith

The term 'self-service' has been applied to reporting, business intelligence and analytics over the past few years.  While there are many business use cases for agile, 'self-service' approaches; it is a BI myth to believe that the need for a single consolidated source of truth is going away.  

So, why do I say that self-service BI takes 'faith'?  

Whether you trust sales person 1 who prepared a report in Excel or their favourite BI tool based on the centralized data warehouse that has ingested the raw sales data, applied consistent rules to modify the data and provide it in an easy to use and understand model or sales person 2 armed with an exported sales report, Excel to modify the data and a data discovery tool to report accurately on last month's sales, you need to trust the initial data quality, interim transformation process and final aggregation and visualization. 

Source: http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-08-10 

Neither process is wrong, but there are obvious benefits to each approach and organizations should take a bi-modal approach to leverage the strengths of each.

My experience working with clients supports this.  There are several types of people who work at organizations, but at a bare minimum, there are data analysts (those trained and experienced working with data) and data consumers (those who either lack this training and experience or simply don't have the time).  We are not moving forward if we expect those in the second category to supernaturally 'help themselves'.  

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.

Dynamics GP Reporting Options & Alternatives

One of the previous tag-lines for Microsoft Dynamics was 'it works the way you do' and when it comes to reporting, that pretty well sums up the Microsoft Dynamics GP offering in a nutshell.

There are a lot of options for reporting! 

Sometimes the options themselves can be confusing; however, remember that each reporting tool has its pros/cons and 'sweet spots' as my recent client exercise below shows:

 



In some cases, third-party reporting and/or planning tools such as those identified and circled make sense and drive the most value for an organization's needs.

If you 100% of your planning and reporting needs for Microsoft Dynamics ERP are not being met, tell me about it below and lets see how I can help.

Count Down to Jet Express for Microsoft Dynamics GP!

Jet Express is the latest in the full selection of friendly, easy to use reporting and analytics tools available from Jet Reports. It is a free Excel based reporting tool that will be made available for Dynamics GP at Convergence 2013 in mid-March 2013.


Let the count-down begin!

BI Snowflakes & Stars - All Are Unique

I couldn't resist another winter themed post on Business Intelligence. 

While those of us who are less technically inclined may enjoy the picture below, those who design and develop data marts and data warehouses are very familiar with both the snowflake and star schema.

Image Source: http://www.thewallz.com/wallpaper/glowing-christmas-star-and-snowflakes_w403.html

One popular truth regarding snowflakes is that no two snowflakes are identical.  When it comes to Business Intelligence, no two organization's needs are identical either. 

Enjoy the winter beauty of stars and snowflakes this season - and let us take care of data structure underpinning your Business Intelligence solution.  You'll be happy you did!

On Demand TARGIT BI Demo

Kyle McNerney of TARGIT has kindly put together a 20 minute overview of TARGIT BI, the leading BI/analytics solution for Dynamics ERP.

Click here to register and view.

Top 7 Benefits of Acheiving Self-Service BI

Self-service BI is not just a buzz-word.  It is an approach to analytics that enables business users to analyze organizational information (i.e. create reports, make dash boards, perform ad-hoc analysis, configure alerts).  IT resources are not required on a continual basis to support end users, but rather only to set up the back-end (i.e. the data warehouse/data marts and related cubes underpinning the business intelligence system).  Further, if an existing back-end solution is available, IT may not be required at all!

Top 7 Benefits of Achieving Self-Service BI:

• Enable business users to create personalized reports and conduct analysis without IT involvement
• Free IT resources to focus on other tasks
• Improve organizational decision making
• Increase responce time to changes in the business environment
• Improve allocation of resources
• Reduce organizational risk
• Improve organizational results

TimeXtender simplifies the BI backend!

Tell me, just how many executives, business analysts and other BI end users are excited by the deep technical knowledge and time it takes to properly develop and maintain the backend of a BI solution, namely a data warehouse, the extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and finally the cubes themselves?  But without a good backend for your BI solution, even the best dashboarding and BI/analytics solution available (i.e. TARGIT BI) will not be able to provide the information that your organization needs to for analysis and effective performance management.

TimeXtender simplifies the administration of the BI backend so that your organization can realize the value of its chosen analytics/visualization solution.

This is also part of the reason Jet Reports partnered with TimeXtender in their Jet Enterprise offering.  Read the interview with Joe Little, President of Jet Reports, here.

TARGIT BI - A proven BI solution that works!

TARGIT BI has been recently recognized in a BARC research study as the most widespread BI solution used due to ease of use and product functionality.  For a summary of the results of this study, please click here.

Top 7 Reasons to Choose TARGIT Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM

The following Top 7 Reasons to choose TARGIT Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM were presented at BDO's annual user conference  on May 12, 2011:



1) Easy to Use
2) Highly Interactive
3) Enables ‘Power Users’
4) Unique CALM/OODA Philosophy
5) Consolidate Reporting across Multiple Data Sources
6) Enterprise Level Solution
7) Better Performance
 
The following are a few key aspects from what I presented.
 
My take on how BI has evolved and how the level of insight has increased over time
 

 
An introduction to the Performance Management Pyramid or my explanation of what it takes for an organization to successfully implement and utilize a CPM solution
 

 
An introduction to TARGIT's unique CALM or OODA philosophy, which is embedded into their entire solution
 

 
A sample TARGIT dashboard
 

 
Please contact me for more information on how TARGIT might revolutionize BI in your organization and/or visit http://www.targit.com/

SmartView for Dynamics GP

When it comes to how to get your information out of Microsoft Dynamics GP, there are so many alternatives!

One distinction that I formally made between SmartLists (whether the out-of-the-box SmartLists or the custom SmartList Builder lists) and Reports (whether SRS Reports or Crystal Reports) is that reports typically have grouping and totalling of data to facilitate analysis and decision making.  Well, that distinction between 'lists' and 'reports' has been blown away with the introduction of SmartView for Dynamics GP!  This is a 'must-see' and 'must-have' tool for any and all GP users.

SmartView is like GP’s SmartLists; however, it is a whole lot better! SmartView is a fast, flexible and easy to use Excel-like tool for analysis that works with all existing SmartLists, including those built using SmartList Builder.

SmartView features include:
• Faster retrieval of data than the SmartLists they are based on.


• Unlimited & Advanced Filters to isolate just the data that you want to see.


• Grouping & Subtotals to dynamically group your data by dragging and dropping.

The Evolution of SmartLists to SmartListBuider to SmartView looks something like this:

Click here to watch a SmartView demo: SmartView Demo  (Make sure you select the Windows Media File version.)

For more information on SmartView for Dynamics GP contact your partner.