Looking for an FRx, MR, or Forecaster alternative or replacement?

For the record, I am a huge supporter of Microsoft's CPM solutions, which currently include FRx, MR and Forecaster.  While these solutions generally serve most CPM needs, there are certain CPM requirements that cannot be addressed well by these solutions.

Prophix CPM is a scalable enterprise level CPM solution that can handle 7 of these more challenging requirements:

1. Combine financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts
2. Facilitate complex planning and forecasting scenarios
3. Improve reporting speed
4. Facilitate a robust workflow to help manage the budgeting cycle
5. Automate the dissemination of reports and budgeting templates
6. Fully automate and schedule administrative functions (i.e. loading of data, etc)
7. Reduce administration to facilitate more frequent forecasting and timely intervention

If you're looking for a replacement for any or all of these solutions, Prophix CPM should make the short-list. Contact me or view the autodemo for more information.

MR Translations - FRx vs MR

Management Reporter's financial translations feature is completely different from FRx's functionality, which is a welcome improvement!

The highlights of FRx's functionality was that you had to:

1. Re-enter your average, spot and historical rates in FRx's DAX tables (since it couldn't pull this information from your Dynamics ERP), and
2. Have a number of settings correct in FRx (i.e. company currency, report catalogue translations feature, translations activated in the column and the column syntax correct). 

The beauty of the translations feature in MR is that it leverages the Dynamics ERP exchange rate information.  In Dynamics GP, it specifically references a default exchange table.  So, in most cases, a client can have two exchange tables (i.e. monthly average, and spot/historical) used for multiple purposes including: calculating exchange at time of transaction, revaluing foreign currency transactions and financial translations. Next, you have to set the translation setting for each account in your ERP.

Once this is complete, there is only one step to perform in Management Reporter to produce a translated financial statement, namely, ensure that you have a column with the Currency Source set to the translated currency.  In the sample below, the functional currency is USD and the translated currency is CAD:



MR Column Translating USD to CAD

This is what the final report looks like:

Sample MR Translated Report

I must say, this functionality is a great improvement and much more efficient than what was provided in FRx.  Enjoy!

Dilbert and Why to Not Budget using Excel

For many smaller organizations with simple budgeting/forecasting needs, Excel works just fine.  However, as Dilbert points out below, there are certainly drawbacks to using Excel:

Source: http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-06-02

For organizations with more complicating needs, the value of a using a dedicated CPM solution for budgeting/forecasting and financial/management reporting are myriad, including:
- Simplify and better control the budgeting process
- Reduced administration of the budgeting cycle
- Increased collaboration
- Real time version control
- Mitigate speadsheet ‘mis-calculations’ and ‘overrides’
- Better manage security
- Historical tracking/audit of changes
- Integrated financial/management reporting solution to facilitate variance reporting
- Simply reforecasting administration

How to Migrate from FRx to MR (Management Reporter)

The steps below are based on a combination of guidance provided by Microsoft, as well as, my own experience. 

An interesting statistic is that in a recent organizations migration from FRx to MR, 80% of the reports migrated properly with very little manual intervention.  A further 10% required moderate intervention and the last 10% required re-design due to the fact that row linking was used in FRx. 

Pre-Migration Clean Up in FRx

• Backup your Sysdata folder
• Backup your Specification Set(s)
• Decide which FRx reports and associated building blocks you wish to migrate to MR
• Prepare your FRx data for migration
• Remove/rename any building blocks with 'spaces' at the beginning of its ID
• Delete any unneeded reports and building blocks
• Delete any companies not in use, including the sample companies 
• Associate any building blocks not being used with a Report Catalogue (otherwise, it will not be migrated to MR)
• Ensure that any rows currently used with a row linking design in FRx are attached to a Report Catalogue, as they may not convert properly based on my experience.  (Note: Any reports with Reporting Trees that are referencing multiple rows will not be migrated properly as row linking is not currently supported.  Having said that, it is possible to reference multiple dimensions using the row links in a single row format, but I have seen some issues with this design migrating properly.) 
• Remove any .G32 files not required 
• Compact the FRx database
• Set each FRx company as default
• Ensure all GP2010 companies have the same segment names.  This step is only required if you have a multi-company installation and you have the same or similar segments/dimensions in each company's chart of accounts.  FRx' segment approach did not look at the actual names of the segment (i.e. Account, Department) but rather its position/length.  MR does look at this information and a typo or segment identified as 'Segment 1' could botch your entire migration!

Run MR Migration Wizard

• The documentation on this is readily available and quite good.

Review & Clean Up Reports in MR
 Remember, running the MR wizard is generally a one-time event, as each time you run it, it will remove all the MR building blocks.



Cautions:

• Rather than muddying your production FRx environment, I would recommend a separate FRx installation, preferably pointing at your GP2010 data as this comes in handy for validating that reports are working properly.
• Remember to review the current MR readme information for information on what does not migrate (i.e. security) as well as to understand the functionality differences between FRx/MR (i.e. row linking, account sets)

Good luck!

Forecaster 'Missing Link' Found!

With Microsoft's recent release of the Forecaster Data Transfer Tool, a 'missing link' in the Microsoft CPM solution has been delivered.  

This is excellent news and means that we no longer have to rely on a manual Excel based method to feed Forecaster data into Dynamics GP.  Instead, this process can now be automated. 

It also allows Management Reporter to report on Forecaster data via Dynamics GP versus directly as can be done in FRx.

Best of all, this tool is free! 

For more information, visit the Microsoft Dynamics CPM blog or CustomerSource.

Note: The tool is compliant with GP2010.

Management Reporter: The Devil is in the Details!

Jan Harrigan's post on transaction level drill-down in FRx (here) inspired me to draft this post on how to achieve transaction level drill-down in MR.

The basics and tips that Jan covered in her post apply to MR.  The main difference is found in the column design.  In MR, you do this by selecting ‘ATTR’ as the column type, then selecting an Attribute Category. The screen shot below shows what this looks like. As a reminder, you need to have a ‘Periodic’ vs ‘YTD’ FD column type in the column for the transaction level drill-down to work AND ensure that the Report itself is set to display Financial, Account & Transaction level information.

Finally, the full list of all 19 transaction level 'categories' currently available for display on drill-down in MR are:

Audit Trail Code
Batch ID
Currency ID
Distribution Reference
Exchange Rate
Journal Entry
Originating Audit Trail Code
Originating Document Number
Originating Master Record ID
Originating Master Record Name
Originating Transaction Type
Reference
Reporting Ledger
Series
Source Document
TAPL
TDESC
Transaction Date
Voided

Have fun exploring the transaction level details! 
 
Note: Drill-down to Dynamics GP is currently not available in MR, but is expected to be included in Feature Pack 2, which is anticipated to be released in the spring/summer of 2011.

Migrating to Management Reporter (MR) from FRx when Upgrading to GP2010

Most of FRx’s core functionality is already built into Management Reporter (MR), including multi-company consolidation, multi-currency and AA integration. As such, many organizations using FRx could migrate to MR today along with GP2010 upgrade. 

Note:  Organizations do not have to migrate to MR with a GP2010 upgrade; however, an upgrade to GP2010 is required to use MR.

Having said that, a review of FRx functionality currently being used to ensure there are no surprise functionality gaps that may pose an issue upon migration is a good idea!

While this information is constantly changing, a current snap-shot of functionality gaps is outlined below:



'Not Yet' in MR:

Feature Pack 1 (FP/SP1), which is scheduled for fall 2010, is expected to have the following functionality:


• Translations (based off GP translations enhancement which is not yet in GP2010)


• Forecaster integration that will be more advanced that FRx’s

Feature Pack 2 (FP/SP2) which has a 'distribution' theme, scheduled for spring/summer 2011, is expected to have the following functionality:


• Sharepoint integration


• Email


• Drill down to GP (inquiry screen and possibly SRS reports)

'Not Currently Planned' for MR:

I believe the only ‘real’ deal breaker here is ‘row linking’ which is used in a small percentage of advanced FRx design environments.  However, a few other items, such as 'report manager' and 'effective dates' are also currently not planned to be incorporated into MR.  That may be somewhat misleading though, as MR may incorporate different more advanced functionality that would handle the same type of situations and much more.

 'Different' or 'Improved' in MR:



Many features in MR are improved or different.  A few of these items are listed below:


• Translations (SP1)


• Forecaster integration (SP1)


• No Webport – Report Library (Current) or Sharepoint (SP2)


This is not a complete list.  I hope to blog about these features in the future, so stay tuned!

Introducing Management Reporter

Management Reporter (MR) is Microsoft's Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platform for its Dynamics ERP solutions. It has been available for Dynamics GP2010 for about a month (See Microsoft's official Press Release).

CPM is a Business Intelligence (BI) capability area covering:

• financial reporting,
• consolidations,
• planning,
• budgeting and
• forecasting

In short, MR is FRx on steroids! In fact, MR is much more than that. It is more than a new graphical user interface, the entire product has been rebuilt from the back end (how it accesses data) to the front end (the user interface). It is the foundation upon which the future of Microsoft's CPM solutions will be built and that is very exciting!
MR effectively replaces FRx for users on Dynamics GP2010 and above. However, some advanced FRx reporting design capabilities are slated to be delivered in the fall of 2010, so not every FRx installation can migrate to MR today. Remember, patience is a virtue!
If you're worried about migrating from FRx to MR, don't be, because Microsoft has built a migration path/tool. Of course, each situation is unique and some manual updating of reports may be requried in some circumstances.
In case you are wondering, MR is currently slated to encompass the planning, budgeting and forecasting capabilties of Microsoft Forecaster by 2011, thus effectively replacing that product as well. As with FRx, a migration path will be available. So, your current investment is safe!
A final word of praise for FRx... FRx has been the industry leading financial reporting package for nearly 20 years. I think we all agree that it is a great product, but it is based on old technology and I think we can also agree that it needs more than just a facelift to carry it into the future. That, together with Microsoft's vision to build the industry leading CPM solution on a common platform, is essentially the raison d'être for Management Reporter.
Warning: Management Reporter may cause financial report designers to renew their excitement for creating financial reports.