As is well known, the Management Reporter tool integrated into the Microsoft Dynamics ERP allows the production of financial statements. And it is still so with the cloud version of For Finance. For its part, Power BI is in all the shortlists for data analyses. But, despite promises of simplicity, getting started and jumping in is not that simple. But as it often is, when one knows how, it’s easy. 

On paper, Management Reporter, now renamed Financial Reporting, was designed to make your life easier. Designed by accountants for accountants, as the ad says, it helps create  personalized financial reports to respond to the needs of any business. Financial pros are supposed to be able to prepare in a few minutes high volume reports with good presentation qualities. The Report Wizard makes it easy to design, store and generate documents from reusable building blocks containing line, column and tree definitions. The whole without the need to recreate typical scenarios for each reporting period. Cool, no? Personally, I’ve never set it up. It’s not for lack of trying, I must tell you, I never became a fan. The technology didn’t seem, doubtless, not "fun" enough for me. More seriously, the feedback coming back to me turned very often to disapproval. Negative opinions linked, in particular, to the difficulties in establishing certain reports. Even more concerning, the guarantee that the displayed data would be complete was not assured. And, if so, the time wasted in trying to understand why quickly became too excessive.  

What about Power BI?

Power BI, just as Management Reporter, enables the preparation of financial statements, but in a much more interactive manner. By opening a much easier access to the businesses. Power BI is a tool capable of collecting data from different sources to visualize them in real time dashboards. The finesse of the data allied with the quality of the graphics help to obtain a mor just interpretation of the outlooks. That said, however, several speed bumps explain the difficulty to jump in. In Dynamics AX, more often than not one does not dispose of an access to the data, therefore, the project does not take off. You can access directly to production but with risks about system performance. This is the ERPs major flaw. However, just a few days are needed to automatize copies of your production base, accessible via Power BI. This is the urgent task that FiveForty° undertook at GC Aesthetics. In Dynamics 365 For Finance, one thinks one can defeat the Business Intelligence by connecting to Odata flows in real time connected to production. Nevertheless, as soon as volumes intensify, it doesn’t work anymore. In the ERP tool, it is possible to very easily address the data by configuration to an Azure SQL base (or Datalake). This base will be accessible by Power BI. It’s indeed the choice we made for Erytech. In certain cases, and depending on analyses to be performed, it will be necessary to develop data exports not originally available in the ERP.

Breaking down borders

At this point, we have mastered how to access data from the BI tool. So, is there another reason to hinder taking action? Certainly. Except if you are a large group with dedicated BI teams and have significant allocated budgets at your disposal. Conversely, you are a mid-cap company and your shared resources or the occasional BI consultants would waste considerable time understanding the Dynamics data model. Moreover, it must be admitted, it has become very complex with more than 15,000 tables. And as long as the BI consultant were to need the help of Dynamics specialists, actors and meetings multiply, as would misunderstandings. Isn’t that yet another good reason to not start? After all, Excel could still very well do it… Without consequences?

In conclusion, and coming back to introductory point, what allows to talk about ease is to hold this double ERP and BI competence. In fact, by breaking down borders, FiveForty° brings the two tools closer together. Result, time saved with the possibility to go straight to the goal. In this same logic, a single participant takes charge, from A to Z, of the first version of the dashboard. Then, during the following development cycles, other people can take over, with the project’s context having been eminently simplified.°

By J.Lascaux, FiveForty° founding partner