By: Malika Gaona – Microsoft Dynamics Data Analyst/Business Central Consultant
In May of 2019, Bond Consulting Services (BCS) partnered with a leading wholesale home retailer and distributor to deploy Dynamics 365 Business Central to simplify business operations. The distributor sells unique products that are purchased by major department stores and retail companies throughout the U.S. including Lowes, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, and many others, through the eCommerce Sales Hub known as SellerCloud.
SellerCloud compiles all inventory, warehouse, processing, and shipping data and helps to manage multi-channel transactions for the company. The BCS Team developed a custom integration with Dynamics 365 Business Central and SellerCloud to ensure an effective and streamlined ecosystem. The BCS Team also deployed the Power BI functionality that provides powerful business dashboards and utilizes Business Central web services to analyze data and existing queries from their Business Central environment to enable faster and stable reporting.
Even with the custom integrations and powerful reporting capabilities, the wholesale distributor struggled to monitor their daily sales, as they were receiving hundreds of orders, which placed a major strain on their software systems. A direct connection between Business Central and Power BI would often take hours to refresh the data and it would experience a “timeout error” which prevented the team from reviewing daily transactions. This was a major disruption for the sales and accounting teams as it was a slow and strenuous process to review detailed transactions in a given time frame.
With a recent Microsoft update, BCS was able to utilize the OData web services that allows the processing of large amounts of data in a short amount of time. OData is extremely helpful as it highlights exactly the data you need to review –no more and no less– to save time and cost:
With the OData capabilities and the efforts of the BCS Team, the distributor is now able to refresh and analyze their business data in a matter of minutes (if not less than a minute)! The leading distributor is extremely relieved and excited that their Power BI report is now working seamlessly. The company can efficiently create powerful charts and graphs to easily measure sales orders, order quantities, payments and consumption rates:
This functionality has been hugely helpful for the sales, accounting, and supply chain management teams as it provides fast and reliable data analysis to make smarter business decisions and boost performance today and long into the future.
BCS is excited to continue pushing the boundaries of business intelligence and we look forward to discovering new capabilities of Power BI and OData which are to be rolled out by Microsoft over the next few months.
To learn more, please schedule a free consultation, contact sales@BondConsultingServices.com or call (562) 988-3451 to speak to our expert consultants!
