Partners :

A Challenge for your Organization

Generating business intelligence can be a challenge for small to midsized organizations that typically have few dedicated IT professionals, and even fewer who are fluent in the technology of generating reporting and analytic solutions. Similarly, small to midsized organizations traditionally lack the infrastructure to support a data warehouse and the extraction, transformation, and load processes used to import heterogeneous data into a homogenous relational database.

Fortunately the infrastructure costs of supporting business intelligence have fallen in recent years, though it is still essential for an organization to carefully choose a financial management system that integrates well with other solutions, including a relational database and the reporting and analytical tools required for generating business intelligence.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV enables you to organize and analyze your data by dimensions.

Analysis within Dynamics Nav

Businesses running ERP systems capture a tremendous amount of data through daily activity. This data, which reflects such things as the organization's sales figures, purchases, operational expenses, employee salaries, and budgets, can become valuable information for decision makers when they know how to use it.



In financial analysis, a dimension is data that you can add to an entry as a type of marker. Microsoft Dynamics® NAV can then use this data to group entries with similar characteristics such as customers, regions, products, and salesperson, and retrieve these groups for analysis. Dimensions can be used on entries in journals, documents, and budgets. The term dimension describes how analysis occurs. A two-dimensional analysis, for example, is sales for each area. However, by using more than two dimensions when creating an entry, you can carry out a more complex analysis, such as sales for every sales campaign, for every customer group, for each area. Analyzing data by dimensions helps you gain greater insight into your business so you can evaluate such things as how well your business is operating, where it is thriving and where it is not, where more resources need to be allocated, or steps to take in areas that need help.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV enables you to organize and analyze your data by dimensions.

Microsoft EXCEL

Microsoft Office Excel is an ideal partner client for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. There are numerous ways to export data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Excel, including the following:

• Copy from Microsoft Dynamics NAV list views and paste to Excel worksheets.
• Export to Excel directly from such Microsoft Dynamics NAV feature areas as Account Schedules and Analysis Views.
• Connect from Excel to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV SQL Server database.

There are many benefits to working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV data in Excel. In particular, Excel is widely used, so it is simpler to share data with those outside your company, or even internal employees who do not work within the Microsoft Dynamics NAV environment. In addition, Excel enables users to quickly add formatting and design enhancements to Microsoft Dynamics NAV data.

PowerPivot for Excel 2010

Microsoft PowerPivot is a data analysis add-in that delivers unmatched computational power directly with Microsoft Excel 2010.

PowerPivot gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organizations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools

BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Business Analytics (BA) is a decision support and analysis tool that provides users with a range of visibility, both detailed to aggregated, into different aspects of their business. It allows users to quickly get to the information they are looking for at the desired level of detail. BA was designed to make advanced features and analytical capabilities available to end-users without the need for long implementation cycles and lengthy training in complex software. It capitalizes on an implementer's knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics® NAV, and in its basic version, the user's experience with Microsoft® Office Excel. Business Analytics Advanced provides an environment that includes predefined "smart calculations" and the ability to create advanced calculations and complex charts.

There are two Business Analytics offerings: Basic and Advanced. Both give users a deeper understanding of the information stored in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

The Basic offering enables the transformation of business data into information on SQL Server. Users can then access the information they need via the core Microsoft Business Intelligence offerings and further analyze the information within the familiar user interface of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The Basic offering also simplifies the complexity of setting up OLAP cubes on Microsoft SQL Server.

The Advanced offering supports more complex reporting and analysis needs, while remaining easy to use. Users can obtain a 360-degree view of business performance and quickly set up and review graphical displays and reports.

SQL Server Business Intelligence

Microsoft provides a number of Business Intelligence solutions that can work with Microsoft Dynamics NAV to provide insight into business data. The Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005/2008 Business Intelligence Design Studio is the most prominent of these. It is a suite that includes Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Integration Services (SSIS), and Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) and Analysis Services to cover end-to-end BI needs from analysis to data modeling to reporting.