When planning enterprise-wide BI strategy with Microsoft Dynamics AX, think standardization and reuse first

When it comes to business intelligence (BI) and reporting, there are certain best practices companies that use Microsoft Dynamics AX should strive for from an enterprise perspective, like sharing standardized reports across the business.

As one member said at a recent AXUG meeting, "With the continued use of SSRS and the new data model in AX 2012, it's much easier to do robust reporting across a variety of business units or operations. It's also easier for individual users to get data specific to an individual business unit and start at a high level and drill all the way down to the transactions."

However, the tendency of a global operation to maintain various development groups supporting different operations remains a persistent challenge for those companies aiming to improve standardization.

"When a request comes in to the support team for a local business to write a report for some operational data, the best practice would be to share that report in a format with other parts of the company in other countries so they [can] develop a complementary report for their operations," which ought to move the organization toward standard reports across the company, the AX user explained.

In other words, from a support perspective and a development perspective, it's easier to copy existing reports and tweak them then it is to start from scratch on a new report.

"In theory that's something to strive for," said Tom Totten, BI Solution Architect at Columbus A/S, in an interview. "But the reality is that you have to make sure you have business processes in place so each department is actually ...