That means if Joe in accounting does not have access to view HR salaries in AX – he also can’t see that data when he run’s reports in ZAP BI. ZAP BI was one of the few products where the AX Security Model is inherited into the BI Cubes as well. Given the extensive time it takes to setup security, segregation of duties and ongoing maintenance of security roles and duties, it was important that this be as easy as possible. , one in the source system and one in your data warehouse. The challenge with any data warehouse and Business Intelligence tool is that you typically have to maintain two security models. In addition to these benefits they also enabled the ability to drill down with-in the Dynamics AX data but also right to the source record by linking it to the record ID in Enterprise Portal. Furthermore there were no additional requirements for servers and their data warehouse solution worked with SSAS. The added benefit being that any reports viewed could also be integrated into the AX Role Centers. Essentially as long as the user had access to a browser they could create, edit and view the reports. We really liked ZAP BI’s approach to the end user. Essentially this would reduce the implementation hours but leveraging existing technologies while providing an interface to users they already understand and use daily. In the end what was important to our AX Practice was a solution that required no additional hardware or servers and could leverage the existing investments in SQL SSAS while eliminating the requirement for additional clients. Additionally the end user could access the solution differently from tool to tool including Proprietary software, web browser and others focused on leveraging Excel. Some solution required a middleware tool or and additional server to access the BI data and reporting. Variations on how the end user accessed the data. Nearly all BI tool sales teams concentrated significantly on this part of the presentation and very few had a competitive advantage here.Ģ. Essentially they all provided the nice graphical views of data, drill and/or linkage to additional data sets or graphs. In that the charts, graphs, KPI’s all more-less performed the same and displayed the same. Most solutions had a very similar “end user experience”. We participated in demonstrations, discussions on implementation approach, success rates, resource pools, average time to train, average time to implement and typical ROI/TCO of their solutions.
In order to solve this issue, our Practice began to evaluate the various BI tools on the market. This poses a difficult situation as the true value of an ERP implementation is its ability to data mine the integrated solution to find previously unknown value or issues.
Additionally we find that most of our customer base are currently running with a skeleton IT staff and did not have the resources or knowledge set to maintain the BI solution moving forward. This was typically due to the cost to implement the out of box BI functionality that Dynamics AX. It was evident that too few of our projects were able to take advantage of BI in Phase 1. Approximately a year ago I was analyzing our implementations success rate with Business Intelligence.