Dear readers, in this blog I will present you with various options which are available with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations for reporting and building insightful analytical dashboards with your ERP data, This in turn would help your management in making real time data driven business decisions and build operation strategies.
Before we deep dive, I accept that this topic is discussed for n number of times and there are numerous blogs, white papers etc. already available online. I am motivated add an additional blog to the subject as I found that many customers and in some cases even dynamics 365 consultants are not aware of the great reporting capabilities which are harnessed in D365. I hope this blog would help such customers to utilize those capabilities and thereby unearth great potentials of their world class ERP.
Fundamentally there are 4 options which are available for reporting or building analytical dashboards with D365 FO.
SSRS reports - These are standard reports available in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. The product comes with literally hundreds of built in reports and I haven't met a customer who have explored / used more than 20 - 35 of built in reports. In financial terms we can call it 65% under utilization :). Considering every business and industry is different and reporting needs of each of these businesses can be different, it is not expected that all reports within D365 will be useful for every business. However I would like to encourage businesses to run those reports - at least once and I am sure that you will find at least 5 "new" reports existing in your ERP that can become useful for your reporting needs. Considering that on an average building a new SSRS report in D365 FO can be a matter of 5 days (depends on complexity) - including report definitions, FDD documentations, estimations from your development partner, actual development, unit testing, UAT, deployment etc. etc., if you are able to discover 5 usable reports from your existing product, it can be a considerable cost savings. :)
SSRS reports usually have a parameter form and the report is generated with the data filtered by reporting criteria selected by user.
Financial Reports (Management reports) - Financial report tool allows finance team to define report structures using rows and column definitions. Financial reports are one of the favorite reporting option of finance professionals. It provides great flexibility in report definitions and also facilitates drill down ability from report data to the actual transaction. Latest advancements in Power BI and Dashboards (which we will learn about below) have taken away some charm of financial reports but I know there is still a big number of D365 FO finance consultants and end users who love financial report tool.
Dashboards & Workspaces - As many of you would already know, the D365 FO comes with handful of built in dashboards and workspaces. With latest advancements it is also possible to easily plug in new dashboards in selected workspaces. With some level technical knowledge, it is easy enough to modify those built in dashboards. Of course depending on the nature of modification, you would need appropriate level of technical knowledge to make such changes happen. However changing visualizations, adding additional filters, adding new report page etc. can be achieved with a minimal level of technical understanding. Understanding the process involved in modifying built in dashboards would provide your organization an ability to alter those dashboards to suit the business need without spending a lot of money on building new reports / investments into data warehouse and expensive BI tools All dashboard reports within Dynamics 365 FO uses built in "Entity Store" as a data source. Entity store is a rich collection of multiple data entities and the data within comes with aggregates and measures which makes it very easy to build an insightful dashboards and plug them into your D365 FO workspaces.
Since the dashboards and workspaces reside within D365FO it is easy to control the data security through role based security.
Azure BYOD and Power BI - Finally, there is an additional option which is available for businesses who have reporting needs beyond above options. In certain cases businesses use many specialized systems along side their D365 FO and it is necessary for those businesses to analyze data / get business insights from data which resides beyond D365FO. There are multiple ways to achieve such visibility such as building integrations / specialized BI implementations etc. However usually such options can be very expensive and may not provide you desired benefits vs the cost. Moreover solutions such as integrations are not easily scalable and require additional developments, regular maintenance and trouble shooting.
The data entities within Dynamics 365 FO enables you to export your production data to an Azure hosted SQL database at a scheduled interval. There are literally hundreds of data entities which are available within your D365 FO. In rare cases, where you feel being limited by number of entities or fields within, it is easy enough to extend those entities or build new to meet your reporting requirements. In addition to the data feed from Dynamics 365 FO, you can also export data from other related systems to this Azure database to build reports / dashboards that can provide insights from data residing across your various systems used by your organization.
I hope this post was helpful in understanding powerful reporting and data insights capabilities available within your Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations ERP system.
In addition to above mentioned options there are many inquiries and transaction screens where it is very easy to navigate and search for the required information. I will be presenting you with some of the wonderful features which are recently added in D365 FO. These simple tricks can literally give a power boost to your efficiencies. So watch this space :)
Kommentare