Ease your Dynamics AX migration with a data warehouse

Microsoft Dynamics AX is a powerful ERP system for businesses to manage their finances and operations. After rolling out the Dynamics 365 family of applications, which are newer and fully cloud-based ERP and CRM solutions, Microsoft ended mainstream support for Dynamics AX in October 2021 leaving users with a path to upgrade and migrate to a newer product. Updating a legacy ERP such as Dynamics AX to a new system can yield many benefits, but it can also be a big undertaking with many challenges. Although it might be years before your company chooses to migrate from Dynamics AX, there are steps you can take today to ease that eventual upgrade by ensuring your data is organized and accessible.

Data is an invaluable asset that gives organizations insights into the past, current, and future state of their business, and needs to migrate to your new system when changing ERPs. One of the most common issues that business users struggle with is wrangling together the data they want from multiple sources into a coherent manner that can be analyzed and understood by others in the organization. A flexible, long-term solution to simplifying a businesses’ data is to deploy a data warehouse.

A data warehouse is a separate database that lays out data from multiple sources in a streamlined format built specifically for reporting. Users can access data in an organized way that makes sense to them, greatly simplifying how users access information, plus it reduces data silos and creates a governed data set that will serve as a single version of truth across your business.

Dynamics AX users will understand that pulling together data from AX and a third-party system is a long, complex, and expensive process, that often requires the help of IT or an outside consultant. By creating a data warehouse and integrating it with your Dynamics AX instance, you can seamlessly combine data to derive new insights.

One of the most valuable benefits of a data warehouse is the ability for business users to explore data to identify valuable insights and drive growth in your business. Once data is combined and organized into a data warehouse, your organization will benefit from complete visibility and control of your data. With the confidence of accurate data, business users can create high-value, meaningful outputs such as reports and data visualizations to provide transformative insights to your organization. Using a data warehouse with Dynamics AX, you can create point-in-time snapshots, drill down into details from KPIs and charts, create decks to visually explore data, and identify trends, patterns, and outliers.

A data warehouse is a separate entity from your ERP system, making it portable when you change or upgrade systems. All you have to do is reconnect it to your ERP of choice and all data, both legacy, new, and from third party platforms is all accessible. When you set up a data warehouse long before your migration, you get to enjoy the benefits of your data now, plus be prepared for the future when that time comes.

For Dynamics AX users, when your organization is ready to make the transition to Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you don’t have to worry about data carrying over or accessing legacy data because you’ll already have a data warehouse built. One of the more challenging aspects of an ERP migration, data migration, is fully taken care of with a data warehouse.

Jet Analytics from insightsoftware allows businesses to organize data from multiple sources into cubes and a data warehouse so that users can easily build powerful reports and dashboards. The user-friendly drag-and-drop interfaces simplify data management and report creation and does not require any coding or help from IT. Save time with pre-built cubes, reports, and dashboards.

Jet Analytics grants your organization report and data portability by building reports and your data structure once, then bringing it all with you with each ERP upgrade or migration. Not only do you get a data warehouse with Jet Analytics, you also get report creation through Jet Reports, an Excel add-in that pulls data directly from Dynamics AX.

An intelligent data warehouse solution is essential to consolidate Dynamics AX data and external data sources, giving you benefits today and preparing you for a future migration. With Jet Analytics as your data warehouse solution, combined with Rand Group’s expertise and years of experience working with data, you can put the power of reporting in the hands of business users to unlock the insights you need to grow and evolve your business. Contact Rand Group today, a certified insightsoftware partner, to get started with Jet Analytics.