Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis from Scalable Data Systems

Microsoft Business Solutions- Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis helps provide the power needed to quickly transform business data into knowledge and strategic action.

Source: www.ferret.com.au

Key benefits

Helps provide the insight needed to better control your business
No need for external reporting tools or data replication
Turn raw data into useful business knowledge

As a business leader in today’s market, you base your strategic decisions on the answers to tough questions and you need these answers fast. Who are your best customers? Which supplier should you choose? How do your numbers stack up quarter-to-date? Do you deliver products consistently on time? Do you have the right mix of people? Getting the right answers can depend on having solid analytical tools to extract usable information from all the data.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis can help give you the accurate and fast analysis you need to make the right choices.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an all-in-one solution that gives you real-time connectivity across your business. Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis exchanges information with many other functional areas in the solution including Sales and Marketing, Production, Master Planning, Trade, and Finance to deliver in-depth analyses of key areas of your business.

Turn raw data into useful business knowledge

Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis helps you analyze the factors that affect your bottom line. You can compare vendor data, analyze warehouse operations, develop strategies to retain preferred customers and attract new customers, create customer profiles and segmentation analyses, and more.

You can share up-to-the-minute information such as customer purchasing and supplier inventory, and identify weak spots in your supply chain so that you can make the necessary changes.

Analysis tools help you answer questions like How will switching my suppliers affect my profits? or What is my delivery lead time? You can also analyze costs associated with employee retention and productivity. Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis uses predefined views to transform raw data into valuable business insight. The analytical tools are based on On- Line Analytical Processing technology (OLAP), letting you perform multidimensional analysis using Microsoft Analysis Services.

You can think of a multidimensional analysis as a multi-sided cube. Each side of the cube represents a dimension that is analysed by the OLAP server. Dimensions are distinct categories of business data such as time, products, geographical regions or sales channels.

Within every dimension, a hierarchy of data exists. For example, the hierarchy of the category of time could include year, quarter, month and weekday.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis, you can reduce the time and costs associated with transferring data, while also reducing the potential for errors, simply by centralizing the data from multiple sources into a single source of business information and analysis.

Just select the data sources you want when creating a query in Microsoft Dynamics AX and run the analysis. The tool also supports many languages and currencies. After the analysis is ready, you can save it in the language and currency you prefer.

Get the answers you need in realtime

Microsoft DynamicsAX Business Analysis can give you business insight when you need it. You won’t need to wait for the IT department or a system administrator to create special reports for you. Analyze and drill down into your business information instead of following static reports. Transform data into multi-dimensional analyses that support enterprise-scale data volumes and hierarchies. Manipulate and derive actionable business information by applying ratios, cumulative totals, trends and allocations across dimensions and across hierarchical levels of your data.

For optimum performance, Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis saves cubes using the MOLAP model (multidimensional OLAP), which stores aggregations and a copy of the cube’s source data in a multidimensional structure. Reports can be published without intervention by your IT department.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis helps you get reliable results of your analyses, regardless of how complex the query is. The business data used during analysis is constantly updated because it includes changes as they occur in Microsoft Dynamics AX or other data sources. You can set the update to run every day, every week or every month. There is no duplication or doubling of information sources.

You can also look at the results of your analyses at any scale, from a high-level overview down to microscopic detail. When analyzing buying patterns, for example, you can view information by customer group, by specific customer, specific invoice or by any other level of your choice.

By measuring performance continuously, you can measure accurately whether your business goals are being met and whether your strategies are working effectively. Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis also gives you transparency when looking for the relationship between activities in different departments, locations or subsidiaries.

One of the barriers to traditional OLAP analysis is the time and expertise needed to build and maintain the applications and data. Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis can have a lower total cost of ownership than other analytical applications, by using a built-in Cube Definition Manager to simplify the processes of creating and maintaining cubes.

Get deep analyses directly from Microsoft Dynamics AX

With traditional OLAP products, the process of mapping information between the enterprise resource planning (ERP) business data and the OLAP cube can often be difficult and time-consuming, because information needs to be mapped between two separate systems.

But with Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis, the OLAP functionality and the ERP data are part of the same system. You don’t need to spend a lot of resources integrating a third-party business intelligence system that you need to reintegrate every time you upgrade your ERP solution.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis requires Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Analysis Services, but not third party analytical tools. All mappings occur directly in Microsoft Dynamics AX helping you get advantage out of your business information and making the most of relationships between tables and extended data types.

Security

The security is managed centrally, reducing the effect on users and strain on your IT department. You have full control over which users have access to which models. The users must be registered on the server they select to gain access.

Microsoft Dynamics AX

Campaigns are organised in a hierarchical structure, indicating relationships between different marketing efforts. In order to keep the process as simple as possible, one employee has overall responsibility for each campaign, but numerous employees can be assigned tasks within multiple campaigns.

Easily gather and use customer feedback

Learn from your customers using questionnaires. Web-based functionality lets you design, publish and process questionnaires quickly and easily.

The Internet also makes it faster and easier for customers to respond to questionnaires.

Marketing Automation saves Internet responses directly into the Microsoft Dynamics AX Database, from where the information is immediately available to you.

When responses start flowing in, users have complete details on the target group and can easily see who has replied and the answers that were given to particular questions. Easy-to-use answer registrations are designed to enable effective follow up. Customer responses can be used to get market insight and a head start on planning for future demands.

Integration between sales, marketing and customer service departments is key to meeting customer expectations. By enabling resources from one department to be relayed to a common encyclopaedia, these departments can use a wider scope of information and are better equipped to support each other.

Measure the profitability of campaigns

Monitor return on investment (ROI) by linking a campaign with a project, and view response rates, revenue, costs and the work put into your marketing efforts. Income and expenses related to each campaign can be laid out in the campaign form allowing the cost of the campaign to be quickly compared with the revenue it has generated.

Microsoft Dynamics AX

Microsoft Dynamics AX Business Analysis is part of Microsoft Dynamics AX, a customisable, scalable and global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that provides you with a fast and powerful way to gain a competitive advantage.

More information about Microsoft Dynamics AX can be had at local Scalable Data Systems office, a Microsoft Gold Certified Business Solutions reselling partner.