Topic: ‘Reporting and BI’

A recent CFO.com headline asked us to Imagine there is No Excel. The article goes on to discuss how companies are dealing with analytics and the rise of big data.The beauty of Excel is not just it’s power and ease of use but it’s ubiquity. You can’t throw a rock in a Finance or Accounting department without hitting an Excel spreadsheet so it’s not going to go quietly into the night.

The CFO.com article touches on analysis products for big companies (Hyperion, Cognos) and for startups (QuickBooks users) but curiously leave out mid-sized companies.

I’ve been spending time lately with deFacto Performance Management and frankly, it does a great job of tackling many of the items discussed in the article for mid-sized firms. Read the rest of this entry »

That which we call a table by any other name would work as well.

I have already discussed the default cubes in AX 2012 and their advantages, but they are times when those cubes just don’t meet your needs. Even though this might make you think that you will have to start from scratch for your Analysis solution, you can still leverage the work done previously by Microsoft by adding name queries to the existing cubes. Named Queries essentially add a new source “table” and can be used to create new measure groups or new dimensions and may be necessary if you require tables (or fields) that are not standard to AX to be included in the cubes. It may sound difficult but it’s almost as easy as using a JitterBug phone (nothing is that easy).

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I’ve already written a blog about moving, so I will spare you that analogy and go straight to the avian world. Everyone knows (at least everyone who went to my elementary school) that birds fly south in the winter in an annual migration to warmer climes. In the transition from AX 2009 to 2012, the standard reports are changing from the old X++ to the (not so) new SSRS. SSRS gives you greater control over your report format and I assume is also cozier and full of retirees from New Jersey. While all the standard reports have been migrated for you to the new SSRS designs, you may still have some reports that will have to be migrated manually. Thankfully, Microsoft has made this process very simple, as I’ll demonstrate after the break.

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Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich is an excellent book, especially if you’re a young male with a budding interest in card games and a penchant for numbers. The film 21 (not to be confused with Bringing Down the House starring the jerk Steve Martin and her majesty Queen Latifah), however, was a bit of a disappointment. This has come to be an expectation when seeing a movie that is based on a book. If you’ve never read the book, you won’t have any hang-ups with the movie adaptation and will judge the film on its own merit. But if you devoured the book and loved every last word, the movie will leave you wanting. Then there’s John Grisham (love that last name), whose books translate quite nicely to the silver screen and are a fine substitute for those unwilling to consume 500 plus pages of text. Read the rest of this entry »

Bridging the gap. Making the leap. Taking the plunge. All business catchphrases or Foster the People cover bands? Your call. But they all describe the goal of today’s blog post. We’ve talked in the past about how to create SSRS reports for AX 2012 and we’ve discussed Role Centers (albeit for AX 2009, but *spoilers* the editing of Role Centers hasn’t changed much from 2009 to 2012).  Now it would be nice to connect those two concepts, so we’ll focus on adding an SSRS report to a Role Center page. Also, I’ve already trademarked those bands names, so I better not see you playing under one of those noms de plume anytime soon.

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No one likes going to the dentist. It’s a painful experience and a lot of that pain is the result of the dreaded drill. The dentist uses the drill to get rid of cavities and (in order to make my metaphor work) to get at things that the dentist can’t see from the surface. Not unlike dentists, managers need the ability to drill into reports to get a clearer idea of their business. With SSRS and AX 2012, this is easy to accomplish and it gives your reports certain flair. You might even begin to understand to an extent the source of Orin Scrivello’s sadistic pleasure.

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I have long been questioning how to effectively create queries in AX, but this issue has always been quarrelsome. Most resources that I’ve found online have been questionable, only quackling my efforts and leaving me in a more quizzical state than before. This quid pro quo has left me in quite a quagmire on more than one occasion, but I’m pleased to announce that I now feel adequately qualified to write on using the Queries node in AX (it’s actually a quaint feature once you get the hang of it). It’s certainly a good tool to have in your quiver. Since I’ve met my quota for the letter “q,” let the quest begin!

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Numbers on a screen don’t really tell a story, unless you’re Neo from The Matrix. Unfortunately, most people don’t fall into this category and this drives the need to report data in a visual and meaningful way. With Report Builder 3.0, easy report creation is now in your hands and the possibilities for your reports are almost endless, including maps. That’s right, maps.

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These days, it’s very easy to feel like the world is slowly unraveling, especially with the Mayan doomsday prediction looming in the near future. But with the release of Dynamics AX 2012, Microsoft has cast aside those doubts and forged on with some pretty awesome reporting features.

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