Whilst effective business decision making is critical in any organisation, companies often overlook the importance of an effective reporting strategy during D365 implementations. Defining a reporting strategy is a key part of any solution implementation to define the tools and techniques used to collect and analyse data to surface the necessary business insights needed to drive decisions.
If your organisation is currently implementing D365 or has D365 in production but you’re not making the most of your information assets then read on.
Critical success factors
Organisations will often have a variety pain points they need to address when considering a reporting strategy. The pain points specific to the organisation will often form the basis for the critical success factors for reporting. These success factors are not exclusive to D365, they are applicable for reporting and analytics from all organisational data, regardless of whether the pain points relate to lack of automation, lack of consistency, lack of accuracy or lack of capability.
Some example success factors are;
- Solid Data Foundation established – Single Version of the Truth with well understood lineage
- Ability to pinpoint real business problems and provide timely requests for insight
- Validated Information & Insight - available to the right users at the right granularity at the right time
- Manually intensive tasks automated to enable analysts and users to add more value
- Consolidated BI tool set and embedded expert users
- Embedded Business Data Model with agreed definitions
- Introduced Agile BI delivery model that responds quickly to business and technical change
- Established BI as a visible, valuable service-oriented part of the organisation
- Designed and implemented a future-proof Data & Analytics Architecture and Organisational Delivery Model to support the organisational BI/Analytics maturity journey
An effective reporting strategy will underpin the critical success factors relevant to an organisation throughout the solution implementation and into the future
D365 Reporting Solution Blueprint
While D365 has a wealth of out of the box reporting options, many organisations meet the limitations of the systems native reporting very quickly. Fortunately, D365 provides options to extract data to support more advanced data use cases, be those reporting from multiple systems, analytics or AI/ML.
The D365 Reporting Solution Blueprint is a key component of the reporting strategy and will define the technical approach to surfacing business insights from D365 data.
This could be to align with an existing data warehouse, or to build a data analytics platform specifically to support combining D365 data with other line of business systems to automate delivering business insights to key stakeholders.
The new capabilities for D365 to export data to Azure Data Lake have increase the opportunity for organisations to realise additional value from their ERP data. With data being more available, in near real time with little maintenance overhead compared to previous export mechanisms, the Data Lake is now at the core of the D365 Reporting Solution Blueprint.
For more information, click here: How Azure Data Lake is releasing additional value for organisations with D365 F&O
Organisational considerations
A reporting strategy should not only define the direction of the technology to support business insights but should also define the strategy for the organisation to support and evolve the data analytics capability within the business. This should certainly include the strategy for delivery of analytics to the business (is the technical team responsible for delivering data and reports, or do the business have an appetite to self serve reporting) and the skeleton structure of a virtual data analytics competency centre with outline roles and responsibilities defined to ensure that the approach to how the business will support adoption, collaboration and governance of data analytics within the organisation.
Summary
An effective reporting strategy supports organisations in releasing additional value from their information assets. The strategy should be focussed on both the technical and business pain points and success factors to ensure the reporting from D365 and other line of business systems provides the necessary business insights to drive additional ROI.
