Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI can collect and organize a lot of information for your business – but are you able to easily make full use of all that information? Does the insight you gather include collaboration from every department in your business? Can your decision-makers get the summaries they need in easy-to-follow formats? Is your budgeting and forecasting still based in error-prone spreadsheets?
Take Business Intelligence to the Next Level with Western Computer and Solver
If you want to achieve the ultimate goal of gaining insight into every detail of your operations in a timely fashion, Solver’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution is designed to help small- and mid-sized businesses like yours make the most of your data.
Solver recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to integrate their cloud planning and reporting with Dynamics 365 Finance which is exciting news. In addition, Solver’s QuickStart rapid deployment technology enables customers to get up and running in as little as one day with quick time to value.
In a previous blog, we explained how a CPM solution like Solver builds on top of and complements the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics, Excel, and Power BI. In a separate blog, we also explained the four core solutions that comprise Solver’s functionality. In this article, we’re going to zoom out a bit and discuss how Western Computer leverages Solver to help your business beat the competition by increasing collaboration, consolidating your data, and connecting insight across your organization.
Solver Advantages:
- Consolidating business information and insight
- Increasing collaboration for planning and decision-making
- Making it easier to share and use this information across your organization
See Your Past, Present, and Future in One Place
1. Understand your past
Solver’s tools can help you consolidate data to learn how recent decisions, actions, and market forces have affected your business.
Advanced reporting allows you to draw data from a central data warehouse and quickly build complex reports that show info from your entire business. With a pre-built Dynamics 365 integration, flexible consolidations, currency conversations, and click-and-drag formatting options, you’ll have more powerful reporting capabilities to capture more information about your business’s past performance.
Once you’ve created these reports, they can be easily grouped into PowerPoint-style presentations to present a summary to top-level decision-makers.
2. Monitor your present
Solver’s data warehouse, with Power BI integration and other tools, provide insight into what’s currently happening at every level of your business. The combo of Solver and Power BI means you can create up-to-date dashboards that combine data across entities, departments, and software solutions to give you more info than you can get with Power BI alone. One very helpful feature is the ability to access and process all the information you want from a single platform, eliminating the need to log in to different systems to see different kinds of information.
Additionally, Solver is optimized to make it easier for teams to work together, approve, and make decisions using near-real-time business data. Functionality that helps with this collaboration includes audit trails, easy security, and the ease of accessing the data warehouse.
3. Predict your future
Predicting and making better decisions for the future is, of course, the ultimate goal of data analysis. Solver makes it easier to use all that information you have from the past and the present to create a detailed, insightful look at the future for any role in your business.
Solver makes budgeting and forecasting easier, more accurate, and more collaborative. Securely work together on budgets and provide more visibility for department heads to ensure budgets are aligned and any discrepancies are proactively identified. Helpful calculations can be done with the click of a button – for example, you can create a baseline budget then calculate the future based on actuals to date and a recent version of the forecast.
Want to learn more about using Solver with Dynamics 365?
This article is just a very quick overview to help you gain an idea of how your business might benefit from Solver’s features. If you’d like to see this functionality in action, check out our webinar Advanced Reporting and Planning from Solver. Our business intelligence experts are also happy to help you explore whether Solver might be a good fit for your unique business needs. Contact us today with any questions you have regarding Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Solver.
About the Author
More Content by Greg Williams
