Dashboards and analytics for Microsoft ERPs — Jet Analytics, Power BI, or both?

As data volumes continue to increase, more and more businesses are graduating from reporting to analytics. Reporting gives businesses and their leaders the ability to answer the question of “what happened.” What were our sales last month? What does inventory on hand look like as of today? Analytics instead gives them the ability to explore “why did something happen.” Why were sales down last month? Which items did we sell the most of? When businesses want to dig into the “why”, they have to be able to analyze large volumes of data quickly and easily.

The simplest way to dig into the “why” is through data visualization. In fact, a team of neuroscientists from MIT found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. A simple way to validate this is to think about your own business – would it be easier to digest a financial statement with hundreds of rows of data or see the same information presented on a single dashboard by way of a few KPI’s (key performance indicators)? Most would agree that the KPI’s could tell the story much quicker.

When we think of analytics and dashboards in the Microsoft ERP space, the two most common names you’ll see are Jet Analytics and Power BI. Let’s explore each in a bit more detail.

Power BI is a low-cost data visualization tool developed my Microsoft that integrates seamlessly with their suite of ERP solutions. It allows users to create stunning dashboards and “reports” within an easy to use, drag and drop, user interface. It also allows for users to model data and write custom data queries against their data source(s); however, doing so requires users to be proficient in a pair of coding languages (DAX and SQL).

Jet Analytics is the flagship reporting and analytics solution from Jet Global (acquired by insightsoftware) which was purpose built for the Microsoft suite of ERP solutions. Jet quickly became the largest Microsoft ISV (independent software vendor) in the Microsoft ecosystem by providing reporting and analytics designed for the average business user, as opposed to IT or a database admin. Jet is an Excel add-in which makes it very strong for financial and operational reporting since most finance and business users already have a wealth of familiarity with Excel.

One of the greatest strengths of Jet Analytics is its ability to aggregate data from a number of data sources into a single data set that is designed specifically for reporting. The Jet Data Manager makes this much easier than traditional methods as it doesn’t require manual coding to create the end product.

There’s a misconception that this needs to be a “one or the other” conversation. These products are complimentary and go together about as well as peanut butter and jelly. The strengths that Jet Analytics offers fill voids in Power BI and vice versa. Jet provides fantastic financial reporting capabilities as well as a best in breed solution for data consolidation, whereas Power BI excels in data visualization and dashboarding. To put it another way, Jet is limited by the visualization capability that Microsoft Excel provides whereas Power BI lacks user friendly data modeling and consolidation tools, and is really not designed to accommodate traditional financial reporting methods. When used in tandem, they give businesses the best of both worlds – refreshable Excel reports and stunning dashboards.

If you have any questions about analytics, reporting, and dashboarding tools, our team of certified Data Science experts can help. Contact a Rand Group representative to answer your questions today.