Investing in an ERP solution, like Microsoft Dynamics, comes with a lot of promises. The promise of efficient processes, operational visibility, productivity improvements, revenue gains – and most importantly, the promise of better decision making.
Better, more informed decision making comes from flexible reporting and analytics.
There are many approaches you can take to building reports and dashboards in Dynamics but due to limited resources and lack of technical expertise, most of the time companies are forced into using hardcoded, programmed reports that are written by specialized developers. Those specialized developers are then called in for any variation, change or custom tweak that needs to be made to a specific report.
Once you’re up and running on your Dynamics ERP solution, there will come a day that you need to upgrade. Those custom reports that probably cost a quarter of your total deployment fees now need to be upgraded as well.
Do you see where we’re going with this? Reporting is not a “one-and-done” deal. In fact, the highest ongoing expense item in every ERP implementation or upgrade is always reporting. Take a look at the table below for more details on how reporting compares to other areas of your ERP investment.
Between reliance on external developers and time wasted waiting for reports, your ability to make timely, profitable decisions is shrinking – and the costs are adding up. Luckily, there’s an alternative to this time-consuming, bottlenecked, high-spend approach: Report Portability.
What is Report Portability?
The concept of “report portability” is to create your reports once and continue to use them forever. It’s easy and keeps the integrity of your reports intact. When you move or upgrade to a newer version or ERP system, you can maintain your reports from one version to the next.
Report portability is achieved with the deployment of an out-of-box reporting and analytics tool, like Jet Reports and Jet Analytics. While a reporting and analytics tool will also lead to many other areas of efficiency improvements, the bottom line here is that report portability will help drastically reduce the traditional costs of reporting and save you valuable time and resources in the process.
Author: Jet Global
To access the blog on Jet Globals site please click here.