By Jason Gumpert, Editor
What's all the excitement around PowerPivot with Microsoft Dynamics NAV? Sure, there is buzz, but until you start getting your hands on it, the benefits and risks of Microsoft's new generation of personal BI tools may not be clear. And if you ask for lots of opinions on the question, you are bound to get lots of answers.
A NAV user recently posed this question to the NAVUG ranks via their Collaborate forum (login required): Why is there so much excitement around PowerPivot? What's it good for and why is it better than the alternatives?
Like other broad use tools, PowerPivot has to be applied appropriately in the context of a Dynamics ERP or CRM solution to get great results and also minimize risks and headaches around reporting accuracy, data access, performance, and efficiency. In the forum thread, the answers paint a picture of a tool that users are finding to have a wide range of possible applications, but in some cases can prove to be almost too far reaching.
"I've used it a bit at my site reporting on sales activity (Item Ledger Entries, Value Entries, and Item Analysis View Entries)," explained one user. "Generally my models allow for pivoting on Customer/Item dimensions (traditional NAV dimensions as well as any Customer/Item record field)." He noted that performance is much better than NAV reporting, and that end users prefer an Excel-based report to one built in NAV.
Another user says his company uses PowerPivot for forecast analysis and to report on external dealer sales data together with NAV data. "This works great for our sales people as they have the information they need while they are on the road and even offline," he writes. But long term, they may go to a third party BI and reporting tool.
With the potential to access to so much direct table data, bad habits could form, another user notes. But NAV 2013 adds more controls to lessen the risks. "[Direct database access] is actually a very unsafe data practice," she noted. "With NAV2013, it's harder, even for a super user, to go directly into the tables. Knowing this, I'm teaching myself Power Pivot as a new, safer way to get my hands on all that rich data that I want."
Another analyst for a NAV customer noted that his organization has opted to create SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cubes with their NAV data rather than use PowerPivot. He cites several reasons why they went with SSAS cubes and PivotTables over PowerPivot, The first reason is file size. "We didn't want users having huge datasets inside Excel workbooks. PowerPivot loads the raw data in the Excel sheet and creates pivot tables from that raw data. It does use compression, but it can quickly make the size of Excel workbooks unwieldy," writes.
The second issue was consistency of data. Rather than relying on users to each build out calculations, they are built once for the cube, they are designed and tested by users to make sure the calculations are working correctly, and then everyone has access to the same calculations, rather than having 5 different versions of "Budget Variance" or "Gross Profit".
The third reason is performance, where SSAS cubes will pre-aggregate data when the cube is refreshed, whereas refreshing on a user's desktop can be slow when the data set is very large. And finally, his organization already builds SSRS reports, and he is so far unable to use PowerPivot data sets with his SSRS reports. (There does appear to be limited support already for PowerPivot as a data source for SSAS and SSRS, depending on the versions.)
One vote against SSAS cubes that the analyst notes - they need to be created and tested before users can begin working with them, whereas PowerPivot on the desktop makes it easy to get up and running quickly.
Dynamics ERP BI professional Cristian Nicola of DynamicsBIGuide.com also joined the conversation, pointing out that the main strengths of PowerPivot for Dynamics ERP users are the tool's low barrier to entry, the fact that it is already provided for most users with Excel 2010 and up, and that it is a product with a bright future inside of Microsoft as part of the newly branded Power BI suite alongside Power View for graphic visualization, Power Query, and Power Map.
In a separate interview, Nicola explained that when measuring between OLAP cubes (via SSAS) and PowerPivot, there is no single correct approach.
"They both can present similar end results, with the limitation that 'cool visualization' is limited to Power View and SharePoint on the PowerPivot side, whereas OLAP Cubes have way more options for that," Nicola told us. "You can build similar features on both. The limitation on the PowerPivot is that it cannot handle truly large sets of data, it cannot do everything OLAP Cubes can (but most users do not ever use all those functions anyway) and it cannot scale out as easily as OLAP Cubes. But those limitations are a function of its age not of its ability.
"Now especially for NAV users, I think for average database size and average user needs you could easily achieve the same results with either of them and PowerPivot has the advantage that you can get started without any pure technical resource available."
To Cristian's point, the most interesting aspects of PowerPivot and the rest of the Power BI suite are the ability of creative individuals to find innovative uses for them. A few good examples have been floated in the Dynamics ERP and CRM community in recent months, like this use of Power Map with Dynamics CRM. Another example with Dynamics AX merged external census data - pulled in via Power Query - with ERP data for analysis in PowerPivot and rendering with Power View and Power Map. A SharePoint PowerPivot Gallery then surfaced the reports for broader access, including through Dynamics role centers.
Microsoft Dynamics teams have made a point of highlighting the ability to bake the latest Excel- and SharePoint-based reporting technology into Dynamics products. In October 2012, Dynamics ERP CVP Hal Howard showed off how Power View reports, including maps, could incorporate both ERP and external data in a way that was both in line with the AX interface theme and built on the underlying technologies of Office and SharePoint. As the autumn 2013 event season for Dynamics ramps up in September, expect more updates on Excel- and SharePoint-driven BI opportunities with Dynamics products. But for the really cool examples of how this technology can be applied to Dynamics ERP or CRM, our bet is on the partners and users.