Topic: ‘Reporting and BI’

I wanted to write a quick post on some peculiarities that I have noticed while working with the standard AX analysis cubes. Specifically, I want to touch on Ledger Account Categories and Customer Invoice Accounts. The former is more of a functional issue, while the latter gets a little more into the technical side of things.

First, I will talk about Ledger Account Categories. The Microsoft training manuals for Dynamics AX 2009 describe the Ledger Account Categories as primarily “used to better classify a general ledger account.” There are over 50 categories that are predefined and they do not hold any real financial impact for your chart of accounts. They really only exist to help aid in selecting groups accounts for reporting purposes. To add a category to an account, simply open the Chart of Account Details form from the General Ledger Module and select a category from the dropdown in the Ledger Account Category field (you’ll probably want to get an ok from accounting first, they’re picky like that). Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend, I got roped into helping a friend move. Owning a pickup truck, this tends to happen more often that I would like it to. Moving is simply not a good time and there’s no easy way around it unless you’re going to pony up some cash and have some professionals do it. But why would you do that when you know someone that will do the work for almost free? (Please do not contact the author of this post to help you move unless offering some serious compensation.)

Just as recently, we had a client that was using two different servers for their testing and production environments while implementing Dynamics AX. This is a great practice to ensure the integrity of your production database as changes are made in development, but it can get a little confusing when rolling out those changes. This was the case when some changes were made to the standard AX Analysis Cubes. Obviously, the simplest solution would be to just repeat all the work in the production environment, but where’s the fun in that? There has to be an easier and faster way to move those changes over and, thanks to Microsoft and SQL Server 2008, there is.

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Tune in for an overview on using Business Intelligence in AX.  Topics will include SSRS reporting, Roles centers and basic excel exporting.

Title: Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics® AX

Speaker: Mat Grisham, I.B.I.S. Associate Consultant

Cues are the Swiss Army Knife of the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Role Center Web Parts. The act as links to forms and saved filters, they show work that needs to be done, and they can also give an indication to a company’s performance. That basically combines the QuickLinks, Unified Work List, and Business Overview Web Parts into one uber-Web Part. Its only limitation is that you can only add six cues to one Cue Web Part, but you can work around that by adding multiple Cue Web Parts. Plus, how often do you really use the file on your Swiss Army Knife?

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ERP and Business Intelligence go together better than Forrest and Jenny, and they were like peas and carrots. Unfortunately, most people simply look for the fastest and easiest way of implementing an ERP system and leave BI behind. As I have written previously, an ERP system is only as good as its ability to deliver data to its users and the BI tools Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 are extremely good at this. The main BI tool used in AX 2009 is the Role Center. The Role Center is a home page tailored to each user’s role in the company. AX 2009 ships with 29 prebuilt Role Centers in five disciplines: Finance, Supply Chain, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, and Project. Role Centers are built on SharePoint Web Part Pages. It’s these Web Parts that the users interact with and can be used to enhance the user experience. Today, we’ll cover how to edit Role Centers and highlight five of the Web Parts.

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The most important part of any ERP system is being able to retrieve data from the system in a way that is meaningful. You could have a system that read people’s brains to get data into the system, but it would still be worthless if there was no way to get the data back out again. Within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, there is a smorgasbord of reports to get the data that the user is looking for, but sometimes the results aren’t quite what the user requires. Often, this is where the user will jump up and down for a developer to come in and custom build the report they want. There are, however, many cases where the report is only slightly off from what the user wants and there is an easy, and cheaper, way to bend the report to get the information right. The solution is to use the report query in a smarter way and there are many options within the report query to help the user do this.

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The code snippet below demonstrates how to use the #InventdimJoin macro within AX 2009 to extract records from a table that have an InventDimId in them, and join to the proper InventDim record by InventDimId without having to write the entire SQL statement to create the join and ensure that the join is coded properly.  The #InventDimJoin macro will insert the necessary lines needed during execution to ensure that the join is done properly.

I was doing some AX BI work for a client and stumbled upon the following  AX-specific BI resources.

Here’s a collection of very informative screencasts from the AX-BI Team manager http://tinyurl.com/yhpdmud

Here’s a link to the BI Persona Presentation for Dynamics AX 2009 (PartnerSource or CustomerSource required).

As noted in an earlier post, there are some great new AX 2009 training materials.  I was very impressed with the the expanded BI training offerings (SSRS, BIDS) in the Reporting and BI for AX 2009 Training.  It is a major upgrade from 4.0.

Reporting and BI for AX 2009

• SQL Server Reporting Services
• SQL Server Analysis Services
• Reporting in Role Centers

What’s not included in the new training?  Microsoft Dynamics 2009 Standard Reporting Options.  The link to the AX 4.0 BI Reporting Training is here.  The missing chapters are noted below.

• Auto-reports (Ch. 3)
• Report builder, ad-hoc reporting (Ch. 6)
• OLAP (Ch. 8 )
• Report Wizard (Ch. 4)