ZAP Business Intelligence Application for Microsoft Dynamics

Transcription

1 Buy vs Build ZAP Business Intelligence Application for Microsoft Dynamics One Embarcadero Center, Suite 1560, San Francisco, CA

2 Table of Contents OVERVIEW 3 BUY OR BUILD? 3 DEFINITION OF A BI APPLICATION 4 CONSIDERING THE ZAP PRE-BUILT BI APPLICATION? 6 THE SUPPOSED CONCERNS FOR A BUY DECISION 9 CONCLUSION 10 Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment - Page 2

3 OVERVIEW In today's economy, the challenge to reduce costs while growing revenues by improving business processes and operations has never been greater. With the enormous market pressure to compete and unlock growth potential while maximizing operational efficiencies and driving transformative change, businesses require the ability to equip their staff with up-to-date information so they can make the right decisions and respond to these market challenges. Business Intelligence (BI) applications have evolved as a means for businesses to quickly respond to these challenges and the question for a business then becomes, Do we build our own BI application, or do we purchase one? This white paper explores the decision criteria used in a buy vs build scenario when considering the ZAP BI application for Microsoft Dynamics. The major benefits of the ZAP BI application will be discussed in the framework of an overall buy vs. build argument. BUY OR BUILD? Historically businesses would Buy to standardize, build to compete, meaning you buy to automate every-day or commodity-like processes and build when your core processes provide differentiation for your company. In the business world today, where time to understanding and time to action is so important this old adage is not as definite to apply. This is particularly relevant when discussing BI applications as they are now mission critical and there are many buy or build decision criteria an organization must consider before making the right decision. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment - Page 3 Decisions around time to value, internal resource capability and skill sets, risk management, ROI / TCO, end user adoption, and adaptability to future needs are all important factors to consider when deciding whether to buy or build a BI application. When considering all of the factors and when you add everything up, many experts estimate about a 5x effort increment to deliver a similar piece of functionality as delivered by a BI application. Although this may seem high, when you sit down and analyze all of the components that are needed, plus all of the complexities and start-up costs, the numbers become more realistic. In other words, if you want to build your own BI application complete with all business requirements such as gathering, designing data models, ETL, reports, and dashboards you re looking at a time and cost outcome that s easily five times what you d pay for a wellbuilt BI application.

4 It s important to remember that BI isn t just a piece of software that you install and it works. It involves a great deal of business process mapping and planning. If you look at it as merely a technology exercise, you may indeed get a functioning BI system, but will you legitimately get something above and beyond a few new reports? Or will you get a platform on which the entire business can make timely, relevant real-world business decisions? Before a conclusion can be reached as to whether a business decides to buy or build a BI Application, we will outline what a BI application is, why an organization should consider the ZAP pre-built BI application for Microsoft Dynamics, and discuss common misconceptions about pre-built BI applications. DEFINITION OF A BI APPLICATION Business Intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to collect, store and analyze an organization s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data transformation, reporting, querying and analyzing. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 4 A definition for a BI application is a complete, pre-built BI solution that delivers departmental and role-based intelligence for everyone in an organization from front line employees to senior management that enable timely, well-informed decisions to be made. Typically designed for a specific application or industry, these solutions enable organizations to gain insight from a range of business applications including ERP, CRM and EAM. Today, a BI application should not be thought of as a subset of a larger enterprise BI environment but should be considered as the initial foundation for an enterprise BI approach. As BI applications are ideally part of your overall BI architecture they will contain all of the same components that you would have to build on your own. A quality BI application goes beyond just an applicationspecific data model / cubes and includes all necessary data modelling and transformation capabilities required to manage customer level customizations, BI tool metadata and pre-built reporting content. When it comes to purchasing a pre-built BI application, you should expect all of these elements to be present and fully integrated. ZAP s BI application contains all of the components professionally created by an expert software development team. Therefore, to undertake the building and deploying of a

5 comprehensive BI solution from the ground up takes an extraordinary amount of time and money with no guarantee of success. Buying a pre-built application is an attractive option for many reasons the most compelling being rapid time to value, mitigated risk and higher end user adoption rates. ZAP BI APPLICATION The diagram above outlines the major pieces of the ZAP BI application. Looking at the sections above, one can begin to understand the major tasks and expertise that is needed to develop a fully functioning operational data store and multi-dimensional database, achieve Dynamics application integration and BI report content development. ZAP has built a highly robust BI application for Microsoft Dynamics which includes pre-built modules covering Financial Analytics, Sales / Marketing Analytics, Purchasing Analytics, Inventory Analytics, Manufacturing Analytics, Project Analytics, and Service Analytics. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment - Page 5

6 CONSIDERING THE ZAP PRE-BUILT BI APPLICATION? TIME TO RESULT The first and most powerful argument for buy vs. build has to do with the amount of time, effort and cost involved to deploy a functioning system and begin demonstrating real value. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 6 The time saved not only covers the implementation of the actual BI application but more importantly the ZAP system supports rapid end user adoption and your ability to rapidly achieve BI self-sufficiency. There are many components and tasks that have been built into the ZAP BI application that are designed to ensure a quick time to result and minimize the effort on your part. These include: Dynamics requirements analysis Dynamics naming standards defined Dynamics source system analysis Extract, Transform and Loading (ETL) design and coding Dynamics application business metadata support Dynamics customization identification and mapping Operational data store developed Cross-ledger multi-dimensional data store developed Support for other business system data sources Single BI solution to support the full range of users BI requirements Embedded BI within Dynamics applications Pre-Built calculations and business functions Pre-Built Reports and Dashboards Significant internal and customer testing The above items are required as part of a Dynamics BI deployment. These tasks need to be considered as you begin to plan a new business intelligence project in order to develop a fully functioning system. It may be possible to have a system that does not employ all of these items, but this system will ultimately fail or require significant rework to be successful. One common example of this is accessing the Dynamics application metadata that is critical for the successful deployment of a business intelligence system. Typical DW / BI systems only access application databases to source required data for business intelligence (BI). Dynamics applications have significant metadata stored within the application layer that is required for successful business intelligence system deployments. Support for Dynamics business metadata is fully incorporated into the pre-built BI applications and does not need to be developed by you.

7 Each of these tasks requires a significant amount of time to deploy, and each carries significant risk. Multiply this risk by your team s ability and experience levels in each area, and you understand why many BI projects fail, die after a short while, cost significantly more than planned, or take much longer than planned. RISK MITIGATION BI projects by default are full of risks because of the inherent nature of Analytical systems. Issues like data quality, lack of end user requirements, system scalability and BI tool suitability all add up to large amounts of project risk. These risks are multiplied should you wish to build your BI system from the ground up. Left unmanaged these risks often bring entire projects to a halt, leaving project managers scrambling for cover, sponsors looking for remedies, and budgets wiped out. ZAP s BI application for Dynamics has taken into account the risks faced by BI projects and through our pre-built BI application and our implementation approach we have eliminated the majority of the deployment risk. It is common for users not to know what they want until they have actually seen the end result of the BI development. ZAP s BI application provides hundreds of pre-built reports and dashboards that help users quickly become comfortable with the system. This goes a long way to ensure the system is successfully deployed. END USER ADOPTION Ultimately the single most important measure of success for a BI project is the adoption by the end user community. According to industry reports, more than 60 percent of business intelligence implementations fail due to lack of end-user adoption. That lack of user adoption is due largely to the insufficient understanding of how to apply the BI tool to real life business scenarios. ZAP s BI application for Dynamics comes packaged with hundreds of pre-built answers to real life business questions. These answers boost the usability of the BI application enormously and underpin our ability to get large numbers of users adopting our solution immediately. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 7

8 Instant Once the ZAP BI application has been deployed the packaged analytics are instantly available for use by the business. This supports the rapid time to value equation which is so important when evaluating the Buy vs Build decision. Knowledge The pre-built analytics are full of built-in knowledge that allows users to start answering those difficult questions. Flexible The ZAP pre-built analytics are flexible templates that can be saved as new BI objects that can be modified by end users for their specific needs. Everything supplied is flexible and can be quickly updated with new data fields to meet an individual s requirements. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 8 DYNAMICS INTEGRATION Another important criterion to consider in whether to buy a BI application is whether the product will integrate efficiently with your Dynamics applications. For example, in order to support the business users in their daily activity, ZAP s BI application integrates with Dynamics on many levels. Because of the 100% web-based and standards-based architecture of the ZAP platform it is very easy to integrate the ZAP BI content with a web based application like Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal, SharePoint and even smart clients like the Dynamics AX RTC. The integration within the AX / CRM application screens of dashboards, metrics and reports gives the end user the perception of using one application only. COMMUNITY One aspect that is often overlooked when considering a Buy vs Build decision is the benefits of being part of a community of users. When you choose to build a BI application you are basically choosing to go it alone which might seem like a noble idea but by doing this you are basically locking yourself out of benefiting from the shared knowledge of others. When you Buy the ZAP BI application for Dynamics you are not only buying a world-class BI application, you are buying access to the global community of ZAP users that have thousands of real world examples of how to get the most out of your investment. The most common reasons associated in not considering a Buy decision are cost, applicability to your specific business requirements, and flexibility to meet future needs.

9 THE SUPPOSED CONCERNS FOR A BUY DECISION COST The discussion on cost is typically based on capital costs associated with the BI application software. A license for a ZAP BI App is sometimes perceived as more expensive than the license costs for the many components required for a Build scenario. But this is not a comparable discussion; one is raw materials the other is a finished product. Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 9 Therefore, when you add everything up you ll find that the cost of the BI application is far less than it would be for you to build such things on your own. When you factor in the external expertise required to build the BI application based on your specific requirements, the cost equation quickly starts to favor a Buy scenario. Factoring in the additional costs of missed functionality and delayed timelines, to nonextensible architectures only increases the cost to build. Finally, the time to value has to be included as it may have a significant financial impact to other aspects of your business should a deployment be delayed by three months or more. ABILITY TO ADDRESS YOUR SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS There are areas where your requirements may be seen as differing from the pre-built ZAP BI application. A key component of the BI application architecture is the adaptability of the application to meet your specific requirements. The 4 main areas are discussed below: Your Dynamics application is heavily customized: If this is the case, then this is one of the main benefits of the ZAP BI application, as it quickly allows for customizations to be added / modified to the existing pre-built BI solution. Even with heavily customized Dynamics environments, ZAP s application can quickly identify and add the additional data objects so they are available for your business users. Your BI requirements are different than what is provided: The goal of the pre-built reports and dashboards is to quickly surface up your data and get it into the hands of your users with minimal effort. Adapting the pre-built reporting content to meet your specific needs is one of the key points of difference of the ZAP BI application. You have additional data: If some of your data comes from outside of Dynamics then in many situations that can be mapped into our prebuilt Dynamics ERP / CRM solution. Additional data may enrich the existing data and provide additional areas of analysis to boost your BI outcomes. This is a common requirement and something that the ZAP BI application was designed to handle.

10 You have complex requirements: Complex metrics will usually be created with a combination of Dynamics & non-dynamics data, and this additional data can be added into the existing pre-built data model with little incremental effort. In summary, ZAP s BI application for Dynamics just gets you there faster, with less risk, with a higher quality design, and most importantly put your data in the hands of your business users quickly which is critical to achieving success from your BI investment. CONCLUSION While IT professionals and others within an organization may argue that they are able and equipped to complete the task of building a BI solution, there are real and objective business reasons that easily outweigh this argument. Given the cost, time-to-market, risk, complexity and other factors involved to implement a robust and scalable BI application solution, then it is not hard to make the decision to purchase a pre-built BI application. ZAP s pre-built BI application for Microsoft Dynamics provides a business with a complete solution that will meet their current and future business needs and underpin the desire of all businesses to become self-sufficient with Business Intelligence. Remember you didn t Build your ERP or CRM system, why would you Build your BI? JOIN US! in One Embarcadero Center, Suite 1560, San Francisco, CA Unlocking the Value of your Microsoft Dynamics Investment- Page 10