For many years, there was a wide chasm between traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and business intelligence. Anyone wanting to thoroughly analyze their data had to either write a number of complex reports or engage in a complex and very expensive data warehousing project. Most businesses simply walked away from either the challenge, or the cost, or both. Now as the business world is trapped in a cycle of rapid change and increasing complexity, you just may not have a choice. As competition grows ever more fierce, you need to become more competitive and efficient.
The good news is business intelligence solutions have evolved in the past few years and both the implementation effort and cost have decreased significantly. In some cases, the ERP system may have a built-in business intelligence solution, which has become much more practical with the majority of the systems now being based on the Microsoft SQL Server database. The built-in reporting services, including data cubes, have transformed the options available. As an example, our company supports exclusively Microsoft Dynamics® NAV (http://www.opendoor.ca/products/dynamics-navision/), the most popular mid-market system in the works. While the system does have significant reporting capability built in, there are a host of business intelligence products available that integrate with Dynamics NAV right out of the box. One of these comes with six pre-built data cubes that can be installed and running within a day of effort. The end user just needs to spend a bit of time deciding what information to display on an Excel dashboard. Within forty-eight hours, the sales manager can now slice and dice data by salesperson, product line, location, company, data or a number of options. This information can be refreshed as often as desired but is typically refreshed nightly in order not to interfere with live processing during the day. Other solutions offer position-based budgeting and mobile options.
For more information on business intelligence systems that work with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, please contact Malcolm Roach at 877-777-7764 or sales@opendoor.ca.
By Malcolm Roach of Open Door Technology, Microsoft Dynamics NAV Partner based out of Calgary, Alberta (http://www.opendoor.ca/)