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Because each business is unique when it comes to business intelligence, out-of-the-box solutions are great to start, but customers need more. They need extensibility.
Single Source discoved this when it evaluated reporting and analysis tools that would work with their Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP application. Single Source purchased TARGIT, an OLAP analysis tool, and a set of out-of-the-box, pre-defined Analysis Services cubes built for Dynamics NAV to support their reporting requirements. They thought they were set, until...
“We love TARGIT, but the cubes we purchased would not work for us,” said Robert Newhart. “The updates took more than 90 minutes, and the cubes were almost impossible to modify. Our consultants spent weeks to improve the updates and to make a few modifications that we needed, but their modifications made using the cubes harder.
“Worse, we did not get accurate information because our business rules were not being applied to the data properly.” Newhart and Single Source began to search for a new solution to the cubes they had purchased. This time they were going to ask more questions:
- Can you alter it?
- How easily?
- How often can I update?
“I sat down with the president of Business Impact and asked that he show me how their solution worked,” said Newhart. “In the next few minutes, he showed me what makes them different. He listened to me, understood my requirements the very first time and then, and I couldn’t believe this, he demonstrated how to make the changes that we needed while we were talking. At that point, I knew they had something we had to have.”
Single Source found their solution with Business Impact’s Template Solution for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. While the Template is an out-of-the-box solution that automatically generates Analysis Services cubes needed for analytics and reporting, it is much more. Based on a fully functional, fully documented, dimensional data warehouse, the Template extracts data from the source Dynamics NAV application, performs the ETL logic required by the customer, generates
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the dimension, fact and aggregate tables and then automatically generates the Analysis Services cubes that can be used by TARGIT or any other BI front-end tool that can read an OLAP cube. This base foundation makes extension simple since it was designed to be added to.
Business Impact was selected to replace the data warehouse and cubes at Single Source with their NAV Template for Sales, Open Orders and Inventory. Newhart said this immediately added depth and simplicity to the data being loaded into the OLAP cubes.
In addition, Single Source needed extensive business logic to be applied to its data in order to support calculations such as number of drops, average drop sizes, and other internal calculations not supported by Dynamics NAV. Business Impact integrated these new calculated fields into the existing data files that Single Source had been using rather than creating new files that would not work with their existing data.
The net result: inside of one week, all of the data needed for reporting and analysis was completely integrated; the time needed to run the procedures dropped from more than 90 minutes to less than 10 minutes. This has allowed Single Source to run multiple updates during their business day as needed in order to get that information into the hands of their field organization.
“With the first set of cubes that we purchased I could build reports, but the data wasn’t right and the new stuff, well it didn’t work with the out of the box stuff. The learning curve was steep,” Newhart said. “There were times that I was supposed to use customer or other times I had to use the ‘special customer’ they bolted on. I always had to remember which field to use depending on what report I was generating. That was hard.
“Business Impact delivered a solution, not just tools. They hand you more than your data, they help you use it. Other solutions lack their experience and flexibility. They knew I didn’t want to guess which ‘customer’ field to report on, and their solution allowed for us to make integrated changes. That’s knowing how people work and being prepared for it. Business Impact implemented their solution within the scope that we defined — fast and effectively.”
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