Planning for Performance Management: How Microsoft Dynamics Customers Can Optimize Their Operations with the Right Data

To gain a competitive advantage, organizations must stay up to speed on performance and trends as well as discover insights to help their employees be more productive. And this information should be readily available to business decision makers without forcing them to rely on already overworked IT departments. 

Like other midmarket ERP and CRM customers, Microsoft Dynamics users have come to expect a higher level of accessibility and ease-of-use in their analytics and performance management capabilities.   But typical issues like disparate data stores, lack of IT resources, and often lack of understanding can hamper efforts to improve the data gathering and analysis capabilities of an organization.

Avoiding Data Silos

"When it come to performance analysis-tracking and managing [employee] performance, we need to put the power of analysis in the hands of the business decision maker," said Craig Anderson, Business Development Manager and Principal Consultant at MSX Group, a consultancy focused on budgeting, planning and corporate performance management (CPM).

Like many companies in the mid-market, Dynamics customers often have disparate data stores, so in order for them to get a view of performance one important project is to set up some form of data warehousing.

"But you have people tracking results in individual spreadsheets and that's a death knell for performance management," he said. "Even though SQL Server is a warehouse product, Dynamics customers may need to use some additional tools or they may need to evaluate what metrics are important to them, where they're stored and how they're going to get them into a central location that's reconcilable, that's accurate, that's real time and that they can get some useful information out of. SQL Server Analysis Services/Reporting Services is a ...