Clients First knows their software, but they are also astute business people, and they really understand manufacturing and distribution in particular.
Jimmy Witcher, COO, Merrick
The different ways you can get information out from the data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision)
Microsoft Dynamics NAV is part of Microsoft Business Solutions family and is growing force in the mid-market space of ERP applications. It has many options for reporting:
Built-in Dynamics NAV report designer – Microsoft Dynamics NAV has always had its own report designer, which requires an in-depth knowledge of C/SIDE (Client/Server Integrated Development Environment) to make it useful and has been the trusted friend of veteran Navision developers. It is definitely the most robust report writer you can use with Dynamics NAV. It might not be as fancy and user friendly as the reporting options described below, but it makes it up in versatility and straight down to business engineering. In NAV 2009, from the Classic client, you can view reports in the Classic report layout and from the RTC (RoleTailored Client) you can view reports in either Classic report layout or the Client Report Definition (RDLC) report layout. An RDLC file is a file with an .rdlc extension that is created by Visual Studio Report Designer and stores the layout information for the report. Classic reports support to be discontinued in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 7.
RDLC Reports - You use both Report Designer in the Classic client and Visual Studio Report Designer to create RDLC report layouts for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. Anything that you want to appear in the Visual Studio designer must appear on the sections of the classic report, which makes creating a new reports a bit longer and tougher than if you were to create the same report in the Classic report designer. When you run an RTC report, the dataset is generated by the classic report and is passed to the RDL layout for formatting. RDLC report layouts provide some new features that are not available in Classic client report layouts, for example, charts with 3D effects, images and colors, dynamic sort by different columns in a table. One of the big benefits of RTC reports – you can save straight to Excel or PDF.
Dynamics NAV 2009 now offers the Role Tailored Client (RTC) as the new client. This will be the only available client in the coming versions of Dynamics NAV. Since this user interface is still quite new, it is not always easy to find your way around. This blog is created to show some of the new features in Dynamics NAV 2009 that will make our life easier.
Generate Charts and KPIs for Dynamics NAV 2009 RTC
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has a new type of controls that can be displayed in the Role Tailored Client (RTC) on the homepage of the role center. This type is called a chart and allows the graphical display of Key Performance Indicators. A simple way of creating these charts is using the Chart Generator Tool, which is described in this post as well.
The layout of a chart
For each chart you define the table that the information is based on, the information you want to show on the X-Axis including any filters you want to apply, and then you also define what data you want to show on the Y-Axis of the chart (either the sum of a field or the count of records). You can define multiple measures that should be displayed in the same chart. If you are defining a 3D chart, you also would then define the information to be displayed on the Z-Axis of the chart. This is how your charts could look like.
SAP recently announced that service update 12 will include a new “Dashboard” feature in the solution. In this release the ‘Dashboards’ are more for demonstration and testing purposes but it shows you what you will be able to do soon.
They recorded a webinar/video which I have posted in hi-def on youtube. To check out how the dashboard feature works, see below:
There is a lot of discussion back and forth about reporting speeds in business and accounting applications. I recently did some benchmark testing as shown in this video below to highlight the difference.
MAS90 and MAS200 run on a flat file database. The way it is written, internal ‘hard coded’ reports run fairly quickly, but reports and external applications that access its data via ODBC (such as Crystal Reports) can be painfully slow.
This issue becomes even more obvious when reports use more than one ‘left outer join’ which means you are matching up data from two places where there isn’t a guarantee data exists to link in both tables. An example of this is an Invoice History report showing salesperson information from another table but yet MAS 90 doesn’t require a salesperson to be associated with an invoice.
QlikView is a phenomenal tool that allows us to build data warehouses and Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards in a fraction of the time that traditional solutions require. This tool can be used to analyze data from any source you have and combine it all together. It can also be used with the many ERP solutions we support such as Sage MAS90, MAS200, MAS500, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, GP, SL, AX and SAP Business One.
Contact us if you are interested in learning more. We have a partnership with one of the nations largest QlikView providers.
The uses of the solution are endless. I ran across this really cool application that pulls from the Mediaguide data warehouse that keeps track of what’s playing at all radio stations worldwide in almost real time.
By using this data QlikView built a really cool analyzer that takes that millions of rows of raw data and turn it into something the average person can use to see all the trends in music.
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