R3 Demand Forecasting generates a blank Forecasting spreadsheet

You may come across an annoying problem if you’re testing Demand Forecasting using the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Solution Demo Package V1.0. The problem occurs when you ‘Generate statistical baseline forecast’, and happens even though you receive the ‘forecast has been created’ message. The first you notice is when you open the spreadsheet, and find the pivot table contains no data.

If you connect to the Demand Forecasting SSAS cube, and process the cube manually, you will get an error that gives you a clue to the cause of the problem. The sqlanalysis user wants more permission to the Dynamics AX database. I fixed it by heading into SQL Server 2014 Management Studio, and assigning user sqlanalysis to the dbo.owner role on the MicrosoftDynamicsAX database:

Give the sqlanalysis user more permission to the Dynamics AX database

This is possibly overkill (but it is only demo data) so as an alternative, on the Dynamics AX Tip Of The Day blog, Murray Fife has written a slightly different solution.

I assume this only applies to the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Solution Demo Package V1.0, and that any real environment would have correct permissions set at install time.