The Advisor

A large percentage of the phone calls and requests I receive are from clients asking me how to get a certain report or specific metrics out of their ERP system.  Many times, this phone call turns into a request to create a new report. Although the reports that come bundled with most ERP systems provide a broad overview of the status of your business, just about every organization has unique needs that cannot be anticipated by an out-of-the-box solution.

You have probably encountered one or more of the following buzzwords thrown around in recent years: business intelligence, dashboards, reports, pivot tables, data warehouses, data cubes. These tools and the technology behind them have been floating around the business world for some time, but because of the complexity involved, reporting solutions have either been too expensive or too confusing to gain any traction in all but the largest of organizations.

Historically, users of accounting systems have either been limited to the reports that are available from within their ERP application or have had to turn to ad-hoc report builder tools.  In many cases, these options are far too limiting; the built-in reports do not provide enough flexibility and the ad-hoc tools are either too difficult to really get the results you are looking for, or they just take a long time to generate the data.

You have invested heavily in the design of your ERP system.  Each day it is capturing critical information about your business — what you are selling, who you are selling it to, where the product is ending up, what your profit is on that sale, what customers used to buy from you but have recently tapered off, etc.  All of this information is available to you already, but it can take weeding through pages of printed reports or Jedi-like Excel skills to see a clear picture of the events that are taking place.

A Brief Look at Data Cubes:

Data Cubes are a great answer to these challenges as they allow for near-instantaneous analysis of a database without being an expert in relational databases or SQL queries.  Simply put, a data cube stores and presents your data in plain English terms.  All you have to do is click on the information you want and a report is built.  The interface for building reports is simple and un-daunting and a user can be trained in just a few short hours.  You can generate charts, graphs, maps, or spreadsheet-style reports and publish them in minutes. 

This technology is powerful for visualizing and tracking trends within your organization.  They differ from traditional reporting in the sense that each user can create and run their own reports whenever they want.  Report layouts can be shared within the organization, but each user has all of the tools they need to answer any questions they might have about the status of the business.

We will be demoing a data cube for our Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers during our July 13 NAV User Group. Gilbert & Associates offers a variety of ERP software events visit our events page for a complete list.