When you’re running a business that’s growing, it can be hard to have a complete view of your financial picture and overall performance. As you grow and add customers, suppliers and product lines, you need access to the information that matters most to your business. And every member of your team needs an accurate, timely look at what’s most important for their unique role.

In this five-part series, we’ll tackle the often-illusive topic of business intelligence (or BI), diving into the principles that will ensure both you and your team are armed with the information you need to manage and grow a better business.

Get Better, Not Bigger, Dashboards.

Running a successful business depends on the ability to gain insight from business data and present information in a meaningful way. To be successful, your people need to transform data into actionable insight—no matter where they are located in the organization. Microsoft Dynamics ERP helps them make informed decisions as a natural part of their everyday work experience by making the tools on their desktop even more effective, such as:

Role Based Reporting: Monitor current activity and compare it to historical performance and growth targets, giving your people access to specific reports related to their task or role.

Easy Access to Charts and KPIs: View business performance at a glance and drill into more detail when trends are spotted and you need additional information.

Ad-hoc Query and Analysis: Robust analysis capabilities, especially with a familiar tool like Microsoft Office Excel, enable your team do ad-hoc queries on the fly without the help of IT. They can compare plans to actuals, analyze that information, make the necessary adjustments, and then take action.

With business intelligence capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics ERP, you and your team can also be notified when key thresholds are hit, either through emails in your inbox or messages on your homepage. For example, establish the parameters that make the most sense for your business and get alerts when sales drop below expectations, inventory levels rise, or cash flow is a potential concern.

When you have the right insight and can take quick action, you can make the types of decisions that save and make real money. Don’t just take our word for it. Read how Talking Rain, a consumer packaged goods distributor, used Microsoft Dynamics to get the right information into the hands of their employees for better decision-making. Then, take a product test drive or learn more about buying and deploying a business solution from Microsoft.

Next time, we’ll talk about how your team can take BI and reporting into their own hands without relying on IT.

Register for our upcoming webinar about this topic on April 14!