In January 2021, Solver and Microsoft announced an agreement to deliver Solver’s cloud-based planning solutions to Dynamics 365 customers more easily through QuickStart, a rapid deployment designed as an add-on for Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance to enable the implementation of Solver in as little as one day.
The gold standard of data visualization software, Power BI allows users to connect and upload their data from hundreds of sources, including the Dynamics 365 suite of applications. By combining Business Central with the visualization power of Power BI, businesses can gain even more insight and view a wider picture of the health of their organization.
Solver is designed to help organization create a “holistic” or “active” planning process that is easy, powerful and fast. Here at Rand Group, we made the choice to add Solver as a cornerstone solution for our Data Sciences Practice which supports our clients on everything related to reporting, analytics, budgeting, planning, and forecasting.
As competition amongst businesses continues to increase, one area that is separating the winners from the losers in their respective industries is data. Businesses are waking up to the fact that native ERP reporting is not going to cut it. They’re also realizing that the ability to quickly budget, plan, and forecast is more crucial than ever. Not only that, they’re realizing that these efforts need to be centralized and shouldn’t be treated as two disparate processes.
Cloud-based reporting and analytics solutions provide many benefits such as the ability to access reports and dashboards from anywhere and having the ability to gain instant insights into what is going on in your business. Many modern reporting and analytics solutions, such as Solver (formerly BI360), have made the move to the cloud in order to offer their clients solutions that match the needs of their ever-evolving businesses.
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.” Analytics instead gives them the ability to explore “why did something happen.” 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. We will explore each in a bit more detail.
The Microsoft Power Platform consists of three applications—Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow). These three applications are designed to let users analyze their data, act on their findings, and automate business processes.
Do you spend a significant amount of time navigating from software to software and page to page in an attempt to find the data that you need? Trying to find and compile the information you need to work with can often be a task in and of itself.
