HGH BI Solutions Business Intelligence & Integration Equipping Your Organization for Effective Decision Making Peter Kranenburg RI MCP HGH Business Consultancy B.V.
Agenda BI building blocks - components of a BI solution Demo - reports, ad hoc reporting, cube in Excel Your current situation - problems and bottlenecks Your required situation - solutions and opportunities BI-growth path BI-aspiration levels 2
Business Intelligence (BI) What is BI? The concept is simply to make use of information already available in your company to help decision makers make decisions better and faster. EIS DSS and now BI The biggest change has been the need to create management reports for all levels of an organization, and all types of decision makers.
Business Intelligence Problem: Too much data, not enough information Analysis packages boltedon or not broadly available Dynamics SQL: BI-platform already license free available!
Parts of SQL Server 2005 BI Solutions Reporting Services (complete solution for reporting for both IT-prof. and end user) Report Designer IT-professional or trained end user Report Builder Reporting tool for untrained end user (finally!) Analysis Services (Multidimensional reporting with very fast response times) Separate (no performance loss) reporting database with precalculated summarizations Multidimensional and ad hoc analysis Integration Services (connecting multiple data sources / databases) Necessary to synchronize the analysis DB or to integrate multiple systems/databases (all integrated with Visual Studio / SQL Server 2005)
The Report Builder The Report Model (provides a non-technical view of the database) No knowledge required about relational theories and foreign keys Especially for non trained end users! Table reports Graphical reporting Matrix reports (pivoting)
Opening a cube in Excel (business logic on centrally on server!) 7
Role based user interface (integrated interface) Search Workflow Axapta / DynamicsAx BI Alerts 8
Current situation List of possible problems and bottlenecks A fragmented ICT-infrastructure with multiple systems (or spreadsheets) spread across the multinational organization. Often the report mess stage has been reached. Dozens of reports with only slight differences and unused versions making the system difficult to maintain. Critical business logic embedded in decentralized spread sheets. Some of the critical business rules are only known by a few people and locally implemented, which is a company continuity risk! Fragmented approach of information deliveries (BI) Legacy systems: several independent applications Missing BI framework or strategic BI-plan Future BI-opportunities cannot be adopted within actual infrastructure BI not addressed as mission critical technology (competitors might have BI-plans already!) No complete awareness of BI possibilities (i.e. less back office when enabling customer information on the web) Competitors are already using BI or might have BI-plans
Required situation Verlaat het rapportdenken Role of Software 1. Information Retrievals Leave the report focussed thinking The strategy: Data mining Proactive Predictive Analysis Mult idimensional Report ing (OLAP) Interactive Ad- hoc reporting 1. Develop multidimensional solutions flexible Passive fast Presentation Exploration advanced features 2. Develop user friendly report models users can create their own reports 3. Develop traditional (lay out led) reports (only then if 1 and 2 are not appropriate!) Rap port denken Layout led reporting Discovery Business Insight 11
Required situation (continued) 2. Integration ERP backend Flexibility and scalability The framework that is going to be implemented into the organization must be flexible and scalable. HGH BI Best Practices: a cost efficient and maintainable approach It is extremely important to construct an efficient modular reporting architecture. Integration with ERP back end (Dynamics-Ax) Business logic already available in Dynamics-Ax can be reused by the BI-platform.
Integrated business application Integration BI and Axapta s / Dynamics business logic Axapta and DynamicsAX BI Reusing existing business logic The Dynamics-Ax backbone business application is capable of delivering its business logic (programmed functions) for reusage from within the BI-solutions! Extremely important!
HGH BI Best Practices Creating a modular reporting architecture Stored Stored procedures procedures Views Views Separation of data (views and stored procedures) and layout parts Sub Sub reports reports Generic parts in sub reports (with parameter passing) Reports Reports (continued)
BI Data Mining Data Mining Example The process of searching through data to extract patterns and trends in your database. For example: large urban area customers are more likely to buy bicycles that are in the low or high price range. SQL Server 2005 Data Mining can search for these pattern based on existing (pre-installed) algorithms. Classification - predict appropriate customers for a direct mail campaign Regression - predict sales revenue (extrapolation) Segmentation - indentify groups of customers for cross-selling opportunities (grouping records into clusters) Association correlation between products sold together with other products Sequence analysis i.e. Analyze surf characteristics on a website Example: using classification or segmentation to identify risky customers
Performance management Permanent Risk Management with Office PerformancePoint Server What is happening? Scorecard & Dashboard What happened? Reporting Analytics DycoTrade Business Model Why? What will happen? Forecasting What do I want to happen? Planning, Budgeting, Consolidation
DELIVERY APPLICATION LAYER BI PLATFORM (RDBMS, ETL, OLAP, Reporting) Other Database Sources Other General Data Sources
Performance Management Monitoring, Analytics and Planning (Performance Point Server 2007) Portal and Collaboration (Office SharePoint Server 2007) EndEnd-user Analysis (Excel 2007) Integration BI Platform (Integration Services) Analysis (Analysis Services) RDBMS (SQL Server 2005) Reporting (Reporting Services)
SQL Server 2005 BI summary Advantages Improved decision support (Optimizing decision proces at any level) End user reporting (simple reporting models and ad hoc purposes) Server centric (server centric business logic) Single platform (1 platfom for all company broad reporting solutions) Web based (partner reporting!) Dynamics-Ax integrated (reusage of business logic!) No extra licences needed (except for PerformancePoint Server)
HGH HGH BI BI Solutions Solutions & & Integration Integration The The reliable reliable link link in in achieving achieving top top level level information information deliveries deliveries