Within Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 we have three key Business Intelligence tools that can be utilized to provide value add for any company.
- Reporting: Every business runs on reports to track activities that span from financial transactions to performance reports. Microsoft Dynamics NAV can provide both Document reports and Standard Reports generated in a dynamic manner.
- Dashboarding: Monitor your organization quickly with charts and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to support quick and timely business decisions. Advanced Visualizations are also available for intuitive engagements with your management team.
- Ad-hoc Analysis: For a quick and dirty analysis of account schedules, using tools such as Jet Reports Express allow you to leverage Excel to take a deeper dive into your data.
Reporting
Reports are the backbone of any business. Dynamics NAV 2013 provides tools such as Data Lists and Documents Reports and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Reports to do just that.
- Data lists provide the user the ability to provide precise data views with the use of filterable lists. Each of these lists can be customized for a particular role or need.
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- Document Reports allow the user to produce a clean and easy to read layout of data that is distributable through the power of Microsoft Office Word and Adobe PDF. Enabling the user to be able to create well designed invoices and informative document built from data directly from Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
With both you will be able to produce the consistent and easy to understand reports and documents that you need run your business. In addition to built-in reporting within Microsoft Dynamics NAV data can be pooled and supplied to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to provide more complex reporting needs.
Dashboarding
Monitoring the health of your business is a very time consuming task without timely and accurate data. Good presentation of this data will allow you to reduce the amount of time compiling and allow for more time analyzing your business. Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides a large number of built-in charts and graphs for various roles and preferences. These charts have the interactive ability to drill down into various levels of detail, allowing you to tell a story as to why or how your business is fairing.
Ad-hoc Analysis
A growing business needs the ability to analyze the data they have collected to produce robust analytics and forward thinking insight. Business Intelligence within Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides account schedules, analysis views, and a tool called Jet Reports Express to help your team get the job done right.
Account schedules can be used to analyze from the general ledger, sales, and purchase and inventory. You can compare budgets across time, department, project, campaigns and any other dimensions you may have within Dynamics NAV. With easy to define lines and column layouts it allows a comprehensive method of producing tabular data to be analyzed.
Jet Reports Express enables Microsoft Office Excel to connect to Dynamics NAV by pulling data and utilizing the potential power of Excel – as well as all the data that you have been collecting within your ERP.
Report player which is part of Windows 8 app store is also a fast and easy way to access reports you have produced in Microsoft Office Excel:
Tableau and Dynamics NAV
Once you have gotten experienced and comfortable with the tools provided by Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, consider bringing all of your business data into one location. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is built upon a database; pulling together your ERP data and other data sources (such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or a point of sales system). This database can bring you to the next step of Business Intelligence: Tableau.
By bringing together your data, you can utilize Tableau which is a dashboarding and analytics tool to bring interactive and creative reporting to your business. Understanding your business requires not only access to your ERP data, but data you collect in every facet of your business.
Understanding those relationships will require data maturity, but will enable you to run a leaner and meaner business in the end.
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