My favorite aspect of BI360 is the familiar Excel-based environment, which allows users to
easily make these types of changes to existing reports. This means you only have to make each change one time for it to be incorporated into all future versions of that report. Changing fonts, highlighting rows, adding verbiage, or inserting in ratio calculations are no problem for Finance and Accounting users who are already well versed in Excel and often make these types of changes.

You can even take things a step further by adding conditional formatting to highlight variances and trends or by inserting a simple graph or pie chart for a quick visual snapshot of your receivables and payables. If you have a balance sheet item that might be classed as an asset or liability (depending on whether it has a credit or debit balance), use an Excel IF statement so it always shows up in the correct section of your balance sheet without manual manipulation.

With an understanding of Excel functionality, all of the above can be easily achieved and will deliver reports with strong visual impact that are fully formatted and ready for immediate distribution and use.

Multi Company P&L

Most organizations recognize the problems with inconsistent supplier, customer and product records. Despite advanced BI solutions often lack the management of common structures, what is the core of the master data.

Thanks to Master Data Services in the new SQL 2012 ™, we control the master data and can rely on reports, cubes and thus we increase the reliability of the BI solution. The seminar is intended for people who work as a developer, architect or modeler of BI / DW solutions and to learn more about MDS in SQL 2012 SQL Server 2012 – Master Data Services a tool for managing master data

Contact us for information on future events or if you have any questions info@solverusa.com.

Presenter: Magnus Wernersson

BI360 is the only business intelligence suite on the market and offers out-of-the-box integration to the Microsoft Dynamics AX2012 ERP system. BI360 is used across all industries, and has specialized financial and operational reporting designed for specific industries.(Healthcare, Retail, Public Sector and Education)

The purpose of the summit is to bring Microsoft Partners / Resellers up to speed with the Microsoft Dynamics AX industry solutions, and to enable them to professionally sell and deploy industry specific solutions. This is the first Industry Summit designed for sales and pre sales professionals.

Benefits of the training:

• Drive a deeper understanding of how to leverage the demo tools and showcase the solution
• Enable the sales and pre sales individuals to learn the Industry and language of industry.
• Empower the partners to execute sales cycles and demonstrate flawlessly in order to increase our win rate.
• Learn about the ecosystems surrounding the verticals you have chosen to target.

When: February 13, 2012 starting at 8:00AM through February 16, 2012 ending at 5:00PM

Where: Jacksonville, FL Crowne Plaza Hotel

For more information visit the Microsoft PartnerSource, and register for the training via the Microsoft Partner Learning Center.

1. The role of IT vs the BUSINESS USERS when it comes to enabling users to create reports:
• Importance of user-friendly BI tools where IT does NOT have to design reports for the business users because the BI tools are USER FRIENDLY so business users can make their own reports
2. The role of standard reports versus ad-hoc (quick drag and drop design) reporting capabilities in order to maximize quick access to ERP data and thus improve decision-making and pervasive BI.
3. How less is more when it comes to the number of reporting tools that users need to access in order to pull financial reports, sub-ledger reports and ad-hoc reports from their ERP system:
• The more report writers/tools that are required, the slower response time business users will have to take care of business questions and the more costly it is to manage all the BI tools and related training.
4. The role (and importance) of LIVE reporting on the ERP database versus use of OLAP cubes or data warehouses on top of the ERP database:
• Advantage of LIVE reporting is instant answer to business questions based on real time data and access (with good BI tools) to all fields in the ERP database
• Advantage of data warehouse is often FASTER reporting, less stress on the ERP server, and ability to COMBINE ERP data with other data sources (= more KPIs, etc. now available).

Take Control of Your Data

Many Accounting / ERP systems allow custom tables and attribute fields.  Prior to v3.5, these custom fields and tables could only be accessed using our full Meta Data Integration application.  Now, the power to control your integrations is available for everyone within the same Administrative application you are already familiar with. All changes made to the integrations are instantly available throughout the BI360 suite.  The customizations are self-contained so your changes are never affected by version upgrades.

Modifying your integration has never been easier.  You can pick your integration to edit Modules, Dimensions, and Factsets (Transaction tables). Change labels, hide fields, make joins from fact tables to custom fields as well as a host of other extremely powerful options to control what you see throughout the BI360 suite.

Design Your Own Drill-To Logic

With the new Drill-To feature, you have control to design drill-downs the way you like them.  You can define the transaction table to drill to, as well as the fields visible when drilling into the transactions.  The below screenshot is an example from the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 integration.

Planning Ribbon Update

Not only have we added many new features to Planning, but we also have also reorganized the Ribbon to improve the users experience when working within the BI360 Planning application.

Planning Assignments Redesign

The Planning Assignments menu has been updated and reorganized.  End users are presented with an updated Assignment experience organized by three categories of Assignments (Upcoming, Active, and Ended).  In addition Assignment Details, start and end dates, as well as other important status information is now clearly visible.

More Dimensions = More Freedom

In version 3.5 of the Data Warehouse, all predefined dimensions are now conforming.  This means that every dimension can be used in every fact table (Module).  So for instance, in the past, the built-in Employee dimension was only available within the Payroll module.  In order to see Employees across modules, you needed to create a user-defined dimension.  Now in v3.5, the Employee dimension can be added to all pre-defined and user defined modules.  Additionally, Administrators can add up to 40 user defined dimensions that can also be used across all modules.  Similar to v3.0, an unlimited number of attributes for both dimensions and fact tables is possible.  The beauty is that the changes are instantly visible across the entire BI360 suite.  The updated Module Schema menu (below) now makes it incredible easy to configure the warehouse structure, all in a user interface designed for the business power user.

Upgrade to BI360 Version 3.5 Today!

Read the v3.5 Release Notes to find out more about all the amazing new features and enhancements available today.

Getting a handle on these concepts early in your research process is critical. You’ll want to be literate when you discuss your next purchase with your management team, IT staff and eventually sales representatives.

There are several online resources to help you get up to speed, such as the Solver blog and Software Advice. Software Advice is a website that reviews and compares business intelligence software vendors. They recently put together an introduction guide to three BI tools: data warehouses, ETL tools and OLAP tools.

In their post, “Business Intelligence 101 | A Beginner’s Guide to BI Software,” they explain the function that each tool performs, and why and when companies need to use them. They also discuss four prominent trends currently playing out in the market: predictive analytics, SaaS, “Big Data” and in-memory processing. Here’s an excerpt from their post about data warehouses:

Online analytical processing (OLAP) is another key process and technology found in almost all data warehouse environments and business intelligence systems. But while the data warehouse and ETL tools support “back end” processes, OLAP tools support the presentation layer or “front end” processes such as querying, analysis and reporting. OLAP tools provide the impressive tables, charts and visualizations that make BI exciting!

But OLAP isn’t just about good looks; it’s got some serious smarts under the hood. OLAP allows users to perform sophisticated, multidimensional analysis. In other words, it allows you to analyze more than one dimension of data at a time. For example, you could analyze how many yellow t-shirts were sold during the month of July in Texas and compare it against other t-shirt sales during the same month.

In addition, understanding customer buying habits and buying preferences are the keys to having the right products at the right time. Tools like BI360 put sales information at your fingers tips. You can create powerful reports giving you access to critical business trends, thereby providing you the intelligence to make the right decision.

To continue reading, visit “Business Intelligence 101 | A Beginner’s Guide to BI Software.”

You can use BI360‘s Expanding Group concept to automatically list accounts based on ranges. This will capture any new account within the range that has been created in the general ledger. The use of expanding groups also has additional benefits such as faster report design process and shorter report execution time.

Expanding groups are groupings of one or more columns or rows within a BI360 Excel spreadsheet that repeat for a specified range of values. For example, just like you can have account ranges dynamically listing accounts in the report rows, you can have a column in your spreadsheet that repeats for each month for the current year.  This saves you time and effort over having to define each of the 12 columns one at a time.  These groups are easy to set up — just a matter of checking the ‘expanding’ option in the BI360 report definition when adding data fields to columns or rows of your spreadsheet.

Take this example: A majority of corporate and government organizations have department heads with budget responsibilities. Typically, the accounting department will run departmental financial statements once a month and distribute them out to each department head for review. The department manager will then look at the actual and budget figures and pay particular attention to the budget variance column. He or she knows that if there is a big budget variance, there is some explaining to do. However, in order for variance explanations to be provided, the manager needs to understand why the variance occurred in the first place. So, next starts a process of contacting accounting and asking for detailed transactional data for the revenue or expense items that had the big variances. In most organizations, this process can take days and will involve several people and back and forth communication. In other words, it is a slow, costly and clumsy process.

Now, how should the above process work in an ideal world? Here is an example:
1. The manager runs the report on-demand (accounting no longer needs to run and distribute it).
2. The manager reviews the report and easily spots the variances that the company has agreed are significant. E.g. those that are more than 10% above/below the budget. These variances stick out clearly in the report because they have red traffic lights next to them.
3. The manager clicks on each number in question and drills down to the general ledger (GL) detail. If more information is needed, the manager drills from the GL detail and into the related sub-ledger detail, e.g. to see the line items on a purchase order or a sales order.
4. Armed with the same knowledge as an accountant sitting with the accounting system open all day, the department manager now knows why the budget variance occurred and instead of e-mailing the CFO or asking for a meeting, he or she simply enters the explanation in a comment column on the report and saves it to the database so the comment is stored for years to come.

The whole process above took 5-10 minutes instead of 5 days, and not only did the organization save time, money and sometimes frustration, but business decisions can be made quicker as a result of the automated self-service reporting, the drill down and drill across to sub-ledger detail and the comment feedback that could be stored for later retrieval.

Modern tools like Solver’s BI360 business intelligence suite can provide the full automation and self- service reporting that was described in the above example.

Contact us: http://www.solverusa.com/conta​ct
Locations | North America | Solver
www.solverusa.com
Solver is a proud leader in delivering innovative business intelligence driven solutions to the market place that leverage Microsofts BI and Performance Management technology platform.