I gave a presentation at the most recent NAVUG/GPUG/AXUG Summit on practical Business Intelligence strategy. This talk covers a wide range of topics designed to give the audience some places to start thinking about how to evaluate BI solutions – whether BI is right for them and how they might use it. Our video crew here at Jet just reminded me that they filmed the session and it can be viewed on demand.

Just so nobody has to listen to me drone on about my favorite topic for 45 minutes, you may fast-forward to relevant chapters within the video player! Happy viewing:

What are Business Intelligence Cubes?

Most of us use databases in our daily lives, whether we know it or not: ERP systems, SQL databases, CRM systems, and even Excel files that are storing data as a “database”, so to speak. These databases are wonderful for collecting and storing information, but not always so great at showing that data in a meaningful way when we want to analyze this information in-depth. Why is this, you ask? Because databases are always designed to get data inserted in the most efficient manner, which frequently creates headaches when users try to get interesting data back out.

Messy, Messy Tables

These databases store information in tables, most often in hundreds or thousands of different tables. These tables relate to each other in sometimes esoteric ways (think of an Excel spreadsheet with 60 worksheets and references pointing all over the place). When we want to report on that data, in a sales-by-salesperson report, for example, we must understand the relationships between these tables and their dependencies. We take the salesperson’s name from the Salesperson table, the items sold from the Sales Transactions table, the product description from the Product table, and so on until we come up with a report that makes sense.

This process of building reports from multiple tables can be time-consuming and tedious, if not utterly impossible, especially for non-technical staff. Reporting on multiple tables can cause performance issues as well, especially with large data sets. But now we have cubes. Simplified, cubes are sections of data built from tables in your database. They contain calculations and are often grouped around specific business functions; one cube for sales, one for purchasing, another for inventory, and so on, with each cube containing pertinent and useful metrics for that particular area of the business.

High Performance Cubes

Cubes are a tremendous benefit because of the way they are structured: the heavy lifting is already done through pre-calculation. When you want to get answers from your data, instead of searching multiple tables in your database, your request will go straight to the cubes. Your report that used to take 5 minutes to run now takes just 5 seconds, and the end users no longer need to bother with how all of the tables need to be joined together.

When organizations start to collect data in multiple databases, the size of the data sets tends to grow exponentially. Running a standard query against large data sets can cause serious performance issues which not only sacrifice productivity but can lead to users abandoning reports altogether. When this happens, important insights are discarded because the business users simply do not have the time for the data to be compiled. The fascinating thing about cubes and the way they are designed is that whether you are looking at yesterday’s sales transactions or sales over the past 5 years, it takes the same amount of time to run these two reports, which is just a few seconds in most cases. Why? Because of the power of pre-calculating the values.

Increase User Adoption

Are you hoping to roll out business intelligence for your sales force or purchasing department? Cubes are designed to allow non-technical users choose from a number of pre-calculated items to uncover new insights and adjust tactics, and decisions, on the fly. Chances are good that these teams will have difficulty joining multiple tables together with a standard report, but with Business Intelligence cubes, they can just drag and drop the metrics and dimensions that matter to them into their own dashboard. IT teams appreciate cube environments because end users learn to create their own reports, freeing up the technical staff to do, well, technical things.

Ease-of-use is what gets departments and companies on board with Business Intelligence. In many cases this kind of wide user adoption starts a data revolution within a company as more and more managers rely on these systems to help them make fact-based decisions. Cubes help regular business users like us take advantage of all the money we’ve spent on data collection and storage.  Now we can use the data to run our business more efficiently and effectively without having to enlist or tie up high value resources like developers, specialists, programmers, and the IT department. This is putting the power to make decisive “Game changing” decisions back in our own hands at a fraction of the cost of past lengthy, manual, and time consuming processes, if we had access to the data at all.

As Mat Ealy, a Jet Enterprise customer recently put it: “Before BI, it was ‘I think…’, ‘I feel…’, ‘I believe…’, now it is ‘Here’s the data to show what is actually going on.’”

With the power of cubes and Business Intelligence, it’s extremely encouraging to see our customers, many who have been around for decades, achieve double digit revenue growth since implementing Jet Enterprise.

Want to know more about Business Intelligence? Stay in the loop with the latest on the Jet Reports LinkedIn page.

Convergence 2013 seems like a long time ago doesn’t it? Not for me because something I heard while there has caused some sleepless nights. Some juicy Microsoft gossip? No, even more important than that – it was about data. All of us here at Jet Reports Headquarters love data. We even love it when it presents a problem – like when it needs to be migrated from one system to another.

At Convergence I kept hearing from Dynamics users and partners alike that migrating data was a pain. It was a pain when moving from an ‘other’ ERP to Dynamics, and it was a pain even when upgrading from one version of Dynamics to another. The statements of work were huge, the timelines were measured in light years, and the work itself was described as ‘horrific’. All the mapping and posting and testing – in some cases it was so bad that Dynamics users were advised to leave their legacy data behind and start from zero. (more…)

Business Intelligence has been around long enough to be both exciting and affordable to the small and mid-sized marketplace, but has also been around long enough to have some pretty misleading ideas associated with it. Based on conversations that we have with customers on a daily basis it’s time to dispel some of these myths and replace them with truths.

It’s BI! A programming background must be required.

FALSE! (more…)

Our Microsoft Dynamics GP partners can’t wait for the Jet Express for GP product launch at Convergence 2013. Here’s what they’re saying so far:

From our partners at The TM Group:

Perhaps you have seen some buzz already around the new reporting solution, Jet Express for GP. Jet Reports is launching this solution at Convergence next week. It’s Excel based, can report from one or multiple tables and the reports can be refreshed for up to the minute data. Like Jet Reports other solutions, you can report from any table, any field.

It’s a free download for GP customers and comes from the great success that Jet Express had for NAV. This is a great tool for GP customers who have expressed interest in reporting. GP customers may very well find this solution valuable for all of their business users. They will find it a refreshing approach to reporting. From The TM Group Facebook Page

(more…)

Staying at the cutting edge of new technology is what we do at Jet Reports.  Our talented software developers ventured up North to the Microsoft corporate campus in soggy Redmond, Washington for the Microsoft Build 2012 conference to learn about new software development tools, tips and trends in the Microsoft ecosystem. (more…)

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” At Jet Reports we focus on using technology to create our version of magic with simple, but powerful solutions for users to access information. 

News has spread fast of our partnership with Microsoft to offer Jet Express with every Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 and above license.  Jet Express is a benefit for those who are current on their Business Ready Enhancement Plan with Microsoft.  We have had many questions regarding the functionality for Jet Express, so I have included a short description below. (more…)

Below is an interesting post about the power of analytics viewed recently on MSDN TV.  I have highlighted some of the points below as this is a great case for why decision-making business intelligence is critical to creating action that matters.

“Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of the groundbreaking books Outliers: The Story of Success, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, has made a career out of challenging assumptions and finding unexpected reasons for why things happen.

In Outliers, for example, Gladwell uncovered that one predictor of the possibility of a plane crash is the nationality of the pilots. The unexpected reason: Airplane safety depends in large part on the communication between the pilot and the copilot, and not every culture does that task well. “Some cultures have a problem with subordinates speaking openly and honestly with their superiors, and those cultures tend to have more plane crashes,” Gladwell says. (more…)