Keeping your Planning Focus

Do you or your organization suffer from a lack of focus during your planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting exercises?

The other day, while I was watching my five year old son's indoor soccer game I noticed that I was following the action in the wrong game?  Why?  The reason is simple enough, my son was playing a field over and the spectator stands are only available on one side of the field, which meant that I had to keep my focus on the second field instead of the game being played right in front of me!

I believe that our planning and reporting can suffer the same 'lack of focus'.  It can occur for a few reasons, including:

• Spending more time collecting and organizing data than analysing the data
• Budgeting/forecasting at an inappropriate level of detail, effectively drawing our focus from key business drivers that should receive more relative focus and giving equal weight to administrative expenses
• Routinely generating, reviewing and analyzing a standard set of reports, as opposed to interacting with the data and performing 'ad-hoc analysis' on key areas and variances

New Features in MR 2012!

Management Reporter (MR) 2012 is chaulk full of new features, many of which in line with the 'distribution theme' of this release.

Here is a partial listing:

• MR 2012 now integrates with all Dynamics ERPs (i.e. NAV has been added)
• Drill-back to Dynamics ERP
• Comments
• Multiple-destination distribution flexibility
• SharePoint integration
• Scheduling
• Missing Account Analysis

What I find spectacular is that Microsoft has delivered on all the enhancements it promised last year that I blogged about here.

For more information, please visit the official Microsoft Dynamics CPM blog where they are show casing new features each week.  In many cases, MS has included a link to a YouTube MR 2012 demo! 

On Demand TARGIT BI Demo

Kyle McNerney of TARGIT has kindly put together a 20 minute overview of TARGIT BI, the leading BI/analytics solution for Dynamics ERP.

Click here to register and view.

Top 7 Benefits of Acheiving Self-Service BI

Self-service BI is not just a buzz-word.  It is an approach to analytics that enables business users to analyze organizational information (i.e. create reports, make dash boards, perform ad-hoc analysis, configure alerts).  IT resources are not required on a continual basis to support end users, but rather only to set up the back-end (i.e. the data warehouse/data marts and related cubes underpinning the business intelligence system).  Further, if an existing back-end solution is available, IT may not be required at all!

Top 7 Benefits of Achieving Self-Service BI:

• Enable business users to create personalized reports and conduct analysis without IT involvement
• Free IT resources to focus on other tasks
• Improve organizational decision making
• Increase responce time to changes in the business environment
• Improve allocation of resources
• Reduce organizational risk
• Improve organizational results

Why Financial Budgets Need Operational Models

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts.

So, why do financial budgets need operational models?

• Increase ability to anticipate and react to change in today’s uncertain environment where past ≠ future
• Traditional budgeting’s focus is often misplaced (i.e. focused on salaries & wages vs attracting/retaining customers and human resources)
• Key drivers link operational tactics to the expected financial results of executing on strategy, giving insight behind the budgeted numbers and facilitating variance analysis

Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

TimeXtender simplifies the BI backend!

Tell me, just how many executives, business analysts and other BI end users are excited by the deep technical knowledge and time it takes to properly develop and maintain the backend of a BI solution, namely a data warehouse, the extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and finally the cubes themselves?  But without a good backend for your BI solution, even the best dashboarding and BI/analytics solution available (i.e. TARGIT BI) will not be able to provide the information that your organization needs to for analysis and effective performance management.

TimeXtender simplifies the administration of the BI backend so that your organization can realize the value of its chosen analytics/visualization solution.

This is also part of the reason Jet Reports partnered with TimeXtender in their Jet Enterprise offering.  Read the interview with Joe Little, President of Jet Reports, here.

TARGIT BI - A proven BI solution that works!

TARGIT BI has been recently recognized in a BARC research study as the most widespread BI solution used due to ease of use and product functionality.  For a summary of the results of this study, please click here.

Top 7 Reasons to Choose TARGIT Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM

The following Top 7 Reasons to choose TARGIT Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM were presented at BDO's annual user conference  on May 12, 2011:



1) Easy to Use
2) Highly Interactive
3) Enables ‘Power Users’
4) Unique CALM/OODA Philosophy
5) Consolidate Reporting across Multiple Data Sources
6) Enterprise Level Solution
7) Better Performance
 
The following are a few key aspects from what I presented.
 
My take on how BI has evolved and how the level of insight has increased over time
 

 
An introduction to the Performance Management Pyramid or my explanation of what it takes for an organization to successfully implement and utilize a CPM solution
 

 
An introduction to TARGIT's unique CALM or OODA philosophy, which is embedded into their entire solution
 

 
A sample TARGIT dashboard
 

 
Please contact me for more information on how TARGIT might revolutionize BI in your organization and/or visit http://www.targit.com/

SmartView for Dynamics GP

When it comes to how to get your information out of Microsoft Dynamics GP, there are so many alternatives!

One distinction that I formally made between SmartLists (whether the out-of-the-box SmartLists or the custom SmartList Builder lists) and Reports (whether SRS Reports or Crystal Reports) is that reports typically have grouping and totalling of data to facilitate analysis and decision making.  Well, that distinction between 'lists' and 'reports' has been blown away with the introduction of SmartView for Dynamics GP!  This is a 'must-see' and 'must-have' tool for any and all GP users.

SmartView is like GP’s SmartLists; however, it is a whole lot better! SmartView is a fast, flexible and easy to use Excel-like tool for analysis that works with all existing SmartLists, including those built using SmartList Builder.

SmartView features include:
• Faster retrieval of data than the SmartLists they are based on.


• Unlimited & Advanced Filters to isolate just the data that you want to see.


• Grouping & Subtotals to dynamically group your data by dragging and dropping.

The Evolution of SmartLists to SmartListBuider to SmartView looks something like this:

Click here to watch a SmartView demo: SmartView Demo  (Make sure you select the Windows Media File version.)

For more information on SmartView for Dynamics GP contact your partner.