Inciper recently worked with a prominent and innovative IT managed services provider, widely recognised for its cutting-edge solutions and comprehensive support services. With a rich history spanning several decades, the company has consistently demonstrated its commitment to delivering transformative IT solutions to a diverse range of customers in both the public and private sectors.
The company was in a familiar situation to many organisations, with a need for robust reporting and analytics to support data driven decision making using data from multiple disparate source systems.
Having embarked on an implementation of Azure Data Platform with another technology partner, the client had become frustrated with the pace of the implementation, and reached out to Inciper to understand whether we could deliver the desired outcomes at pace; the answer was a resounding “yes”.
After a day spent with one of Inciper’s Data Analytics Architects, a plan was agreed to implement an Azure Data Platform Pilot, sourcing data from Dynamics 365 Sales and D365 Finance & Supply Chain.
The key outcomes required by the client were;
- Ability to combine data from D365 CE and D365 F&SC into a single data model to allow combined analytics.
- Enhanced User Experience with rich, intuitive, interactive
visualisation - Ensure enhanced security best practices were followed
- Ensure the clients technical team were fully conversant with the platform to allow future enhancement.
Inciper’s Data Platform Accelerator for D365 was an ideal solution to deliver the required outcomes at pace. Leveraging best in class analytics tooling in Azure Synapse Analytics, the Data Platform Accelerator was used as the launchpad to deliver a fully functional pilot in just 4 weeks, comprising;
- Azure Data Lake – the latest extract capability for D365 CE and F&SC provides granular data in near real time to support analytics use cases
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Data Access layer for Azure Data Lake to support ingestion and discovery of lake data
- Data driven ETL process to allow additional data from D365 to be automatically consumed into the platform
- Data Warehouse to support a business data model aligned to self serve analytics by the customers business users
- Power BI – market leading visualisation and analytics capability, for pre-canned reporting and self-serve analytics
After experiencing frustration and delays with a previous partner, the client may have been skeptical about Inciper’s 4 week plan, but within the first week, having made significant progress in provisioning infrastructure and configuring the D365 Data Lakes, Inciper brought the 4 week timeline to life with regular weekly playbacks to show progress.
The final playback of the Azure Data Platform and Power BI pilot demonstrated the full end-to-end solution, including enhanced security, with data being consumed from both D365 data sources, a significant amount of business logic in the transformation layer and a ‘wow’ moment when we demonstrated the visualisation and enhanced analytics capabilities of Power BI.
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