As Football/Hockey season is kicking off—let’s kick-off the Turnkey Technologies BI Blog Series!
Business intelligence turns information into action through data gathering, analysis, monitoring, and forecasting to identify opportunities, minimize risk, and improve management insight.
This BI definition above reminds us of an often-seen GEICO TV commercial, “Everybody Knows That”. Like many worthwhile endeavors requiring disciplined strategy & approach regarding BI, “Very Few Do That”.
BI implementation is multi-faceted—but approach strategies exist to inexpensively begin or evolve your BI value & maturity, such as prototyping with ERP analysis cube data & PowerPivot as one example. A strategic action plan is paramount. Yet, before any strategic BI investment is made, a clear ROI and business justification is necessary. Before any investment decision on a specific BI initiative, a true understanding of the tangible functional business value is required (by the business sponsor, executive stakeholders and IT).
Turnkey Technologies BI Blog Series focuses on BI Value Differentiators—or BVDs to assist you as business owners, users and BI implementation specialists. An important goal of this BI series is to bridge translation of BI terminology features and concepts, so alignment can exist for efficient and valuable BI implementation. Along the way we’ll learn BI from both delivery and user perspectives, without getting too deep in any one perspective, tool or method, while matching BI use cases to real world scenarios. An important recurring question is, “Why, when & how is BI planning, infrastructure and investment needed to create unique analysis opportunities leading to better decisions and business value?” For Dynamics GP & AX owners with the starter pack, the pre-configured reporting cubes, or Analysis Cubes for Excel (ACE), is a no-brainer BVD. ACE makes ERP data accessible for BI to all your licensed users, providing consistent aggregated results for analysis directly into Excel & PowerPivot.
So today’s blog, in summary, tells us…
“Dynamics GP/AX owners can implement and use Analysis BI cubes that come with the starter pack, to discover unique BVD (Business Value Differentiater) analysis on their data, using Excel as the interface, at low start-up cost (you probably already own it, if you own the starter pack). With free PowerPivot add-in for Excel, you substantially increase your low-cost BI capability options.”
Let’s keep this initial blog kick-off short & sweet, like the start-up time to get your power users using ACE (Dynamics Analysis Cubes for Excel).
Let your ERP BI evolution happen. I and Turnkey Technologies look forward to traveling with you on your ERP BI journey as you go.
For a high level estimate of your investment in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013, please use our FREE Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Quick Quote Tool. It will give you a great starting point for assessing your potential investment in a solution like this.
By Perry Thebeau, Brad Vorbeck, and Jennifer Espelien at Turnkey Technologies, Inc.– Microsoft Gold Certified Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP Partner of Missouri, Kentucky and Illinois.