BI & Dashboards

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Posted on by Ian Fletcher

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Hello, we have Nav 2009 R2 although will look to upgrade to Nav 2013 in about 9 months time.

However we require BI & Dashboards for KPI's now, i currently have Jet Express, but this is limited, i also use Crystal Reports, but again this is limited.

Our Partners has told us to review Jet Reports & i have prices for Jet Essentials and Jet Enterprise - which looks like the preferred choice.

We have a system of approx 25 users would Enterprise be the way to go, the partner has also recommended qlikview but this looks more expensive than Jet?

The sort of KPI's are to be to drill down on values or send alerts to senior management if a certain criteria is met & general Sales Reporting against Dimensions and year on year etc

Thanks

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4BzSoftware 6,071 on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

Hi Ian,

For report from NAV directly, we have Query and Excel Report.

You can download document at Mibuso. All related videos at YouTube.

Hope tool is useful for you and please feel free to contact me for any support or discussion!

Thanks and best regards,

4BzSoftware@gmail.com
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

found this today...

"...the caveat - 'best' does not mean 'easy to use', 'easy to customize' or even 'generally accessible' to business users.

This distinction is in the fine print. To use the tools Microsoft provides, it is recommended that a team be technically skilled, have a background in software development (acquired through formal education and preferably certified in each application), and work experience. Microsoft itself recommends their BI stack be manipulated by professional organizations such as Independent Software Vendors (ISV's), Value Added Resellers (VAR's), Solution Integrators (SI's), IT developers, and Microsoft developers who implement Microsoft Dynamics.

What this means to the organization using Dynamics is that in order to create a usable BI environment, or even to perform ad hoc reporting (think GL sub ledger report or trial balances during a month end close), they must have these skills on staff to initiate and sustain the information gathering or analytic activities.

Fair enough - these skills certainly exist in the Dynamics user community, but the problem comes in when you bring these different skill sets into the same room in order to build a cohesive BI environment. The people with the right skills simply don't speak the same language and you end up with an understanding that is not shared across the organization at best, or competing visions and priorities at worst. And even with the skills in-house, a common complaint from Dynamics users is about the time lag between an information request and its delivered date.

The people who suffer the most are the general business users who need to be able to use the data to support the organization and make decisions - you know, the people that BI was designed to empower in the first place. This is a problem that can be overcome by gathering the proper skill sets, but for many organizations that solution adds up to time and money spent, and opportunity wasted.

Bottom line - as powerful as it is - if your BI solution is based on the out of the box cubes in Dynamics, you become dependent on highly skilled Dynamics and SQL Server developers to build the environment, to implement changes and to maintain it. And it could explain why it seems so difficult to get your data."

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In other words, it's a gatekeeper scheme.
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

Magically we've avoided having to buy/use an ERP without a built-in reporting function, to-date.
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nplima 540 on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

OK, I'll re-join the discussion from 2013 and maybe Raokman can end the day less disgruntled and with some useful food for thought.

First, BI cannot be just pretty graphs. The visualisations are the output for the end users and are important, but they are the end result from something that we should not expect from transactional systems: accumulated data gathered and optimised optimised for the purpose of reporting.

e.g: ERP picks up an order and turns it into a bill of materials; from that into a stock entry and from that to a sales invoice or whatever. If you need to plot trends and gather data for future analysis, you'll want to store all the statuses and their transitions. You cannot lose orders when they are turned into invoices. That's why you use a BI and datawarehouse setup of some sort.

You haven't seen dashboards and KPIs in action? I doubt it.

Have you phoned a company to hear "you're 4th in line, we expect to take your call in 8 minutes"? That's past data being used to guide current use of business resources. As a customer, I like that.

Have you seen MacDonalds queues with order numbers from preparation until "ready to collect"? I bet there's a more detailed dashboard on the kitchen side.

Have you seen "Track my parcel maps" like that one used by DPD? "you're delivery 60, your driver Sam is doing delivery 48 and will be with you in 30 minutes". Past data being used to estimate future performance, plotted on a nice map. Can you see this being used by middle management and operations people? I can.

MY favourite: watch a NBA game. There's usually a ticker at the edge of the screen with useful bits of info. Things like "when Toronto Raptors score fewer than x points in the first half, they go on to lose 7 out of 10 matches". Do you think it was a particularly insightful commentator that came up with that, or was that BI-supported? Do you doubt that team managers and journalists also use that kind of data?

As for the built-in reporting capabilities in NAV, they exist both for users that read the manual and for the "SQLuminatti" ;) That's why there's a market for 3rd party add-ons that are meant for day to day users. If you feel this only happens with NAV, you must have overlooked that a number of ISVs sell their BI and reporting tools to buyers of other enterprise software.
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

What do you think "BI" is exactly?

Just pretty graphs and screen hogging tables.

Working for companies the size of Kraft Foods on down, personally, I've never seen dashboard's used in real-life. KPI's are used, but there're usually used by upper management who aren't logging into systems like NAV, or any cube warehouse. They're getting email summaries that they can print out and wave in people's faces, and their idea of what are 'key' items change fairly regularly with their changing focus on various product lines, promotions, and areas of the company.

That said, I'm all for the concept of KPI's and dashboards. What I'm against is having to learn still another system, pay still more licensing fees, when NAV is advertised as a one-stop solution. I've used data warehouses (Cognos for one) that usually end up raising more questions than they answer, Cognos at least only being refreshed once a day, at most, for some cubes. I'd like to get, use, and provide real-time information, with the most up-to-date transactions included. But in NAV, querying seems to bring the system down to its knees performance-wise, and doesn't always bring in the most current information as I think it should be given the postings I've just done.

And your statement that NAV "has reporting" capabilities is disingenous at best. An everyday, non-programmer user can create reports in NAV? Really? One of those high-level executives with access to NAV can write their own reports?

This all seems to me to be a big gatekeeper scam, only certain gatekeepers can dredge the information out. If they happen to be consultants, then they dredge it out with a fee.
Ian Fletcher 2,445 on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

Hi JaeW,

In the end we went for Jet Essentials which we installed in the summer & have been very happy with this, so far it meets our needs, there are limitations which would be rectified with cubes & Enterprise but that is a project for the future. As said a lot of my decision was because I had been using Jet Express for 18 months, so was comfortable with the product & also it came recommended by our Nav partner, so seemed the logical choice
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

Ian, I don't know if you've made your decision already, sorry for the delayed response.

I wanted to stress that Jet Essentials and Jet Enterprise are completely separate products.

Jet Enterprise does build a Data Warehouse and Cube solution that works out of the box with standard NAV. It can be easily modified by someone with an understanding of dimensional modelling and some SQL chops. The average install for Jet E takes betwen 2 and 4 hours (and then execution depends on volume of data) but theoretically within a day your cubes will be up and running and accessible via Pivot tables or your Front end reporting tool of choice.

The real power of the Jet Enterprise solution is how customizeable it is. While it does take some know how, it is reasonable to expect to integrate multiple datasources (a legacy ERP, or data coming off your production line) into your DWH. You can add your own custom measures and dimensions to the project as well even once you've gone live with your DWH.

You mentioned you want your users to be self sufficient. Jet Enterprise creates standard SSAS cubes, so you can use your front end tool of choice for extracting the data. Pivot Tables, Targit, Jet Essentials are all options.

Jet Essentials is exclusively a front end reporting tool. You can use it to build the KPI reports with automated emails or show more detail than you can get out of a Pivot table hooked to SSAS.

Nuno raised a great point, it's true, there is a learning curve to build great Jet Essentials Reports. In most companies I've worked with you'll have many people able to View and Refresh a Jet Report, but only 2 to 5 users who can really build them from scratch. There is a repository of free Essentials and Enterprise reports available through the "Report Player" that the product development team has made available.
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Aleksandar Totovic 16,765 on at

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First of all, we are speaking about BI tool. NAV is not a BI, but NAV has a lot of reporting tools.

Now we have NAV 2015 with some BI elements: Expressive tiles with color borders and different KPIs, Acc. Sched. KPI Web Service (using OData), integration with PowerBI...

But, there are still not a really BI tools. If we need really BI tools, we expect data warehouse and OLAP, not only "BI Client".
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

WHY DO WE NEED STILL ANOTHER ADD-ON TO GET BASIC REPORTING FROM NAV?

Why doesn't NAV include a robust reporting function?
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Martin Knapic on at

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RE: BI & Dashboards

I know i'm a bit late, but I would like to mention a BI tool caled BIView (www.biview.com).

Works like pivot tables, allows basically all functionalities like other tools including drill down for dimension members and filtering for measurements as you are mentioning. It's very easy to use, it works on mobile devices (free mobile app for android and iOS caled BIView Mobile 2) and it's affordable. You can even get a training for your personnel.

Ofcourse it works on any database, but one version is developed especially for Microsoft Dynamics NAV (and older versions) - BIView for NAV - check more on website biview.com/.../BIViewNAV and try free trial

Like other allows importing and making different cubes and BIView team guarantees a rapid maintenance. You can also get a security settings for cubes each personnel is allowed to see ... and so on ..

feel free to ask more. Regards,

Martin