BI: Data collection is easy, but productizing it makes it actionable

Collecting data from disparate sources is just one half of the challenge of the typical Microsoft Dynamics customer. The other half is how to glean insights from that data to differentiate and grow the business.

The key to deriving those insights lies with automated consolidation of data, then transforming it for analysis into data products, says Stacey Goff Johnson, marketing director at ZAP Business Intelligence. Johnson’s colleagues Bill Tennant, vice president of sales at ZAP and senior vice president Trey Johnson, will present the webcast Is This the Year You Finally Make the Most of Your Dynamics ERP Data? to MSDynamicsWorld.com readers on Thursday, Jan, 19 at noon EST.

The road to self-service BI

Data utilization is front-of-mind among Microsoft Dynamics users. Indeed, in an October 2016 MSDynamicsWorld reader survey, 76% of organizations surveyed rated Reporting & Analytics as a “Very important” issue related to their use of Dynamics. Looking ahead five years, their leading challenge is challenge was Strategic use of data, rated 3.42 out of a possible 4.

As a business intelligence company with many years of experience in the Dynamics space, ZAP observes that early on, customers required reporting and elegant dashboards and the classic “single version of the truth” – ...