BI4Dynamics Helps eOutdoors Enhance Strategic Reporting
US-based eCommerce company extends reporting and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O with BI4Dynamics, for better, faster, and deeper insights into their entire multi-store business in record time.
CLIENT:
eOutdoors
INDUSTRY:
Retail & eCommerce
Company:
eOutdoors, Inc. is a customer-centric marketing company and multi-channel specialty retailer that sells outdoor products to consumers throughout the United States and across the globe. eOutdoors is a growing leader in the online sporting goods category, including TackleDirect®, the world’s premier fishing outfitter.
Situation:
eOutdoors uses Microsoft® Dynamics™ 365 Finance & Operations for their enterprise resource planning (ERP). Despite the reliability of Dynamics 365 F&O, eOutdoors needed a BI and analytics solution to enhance their insights across the entire business.
“Microsoft’s Dynamics foundation is rock solid; however, there are manymore pieces of important data living in other Dynamics extensions and third-party systems, that we need to analyze for a complete view of the business.”
Patrick Gill, CEO – eOutdoors
Regardless of ERP solution, companies and leaders are trying to get best-in-class reporting and dashboards which can run across their entire business and are specific to their industry. However, mitigating this challenge requires knowledge of what business users and decision-makers want to see, how they want to see it, and what ERP tables hold the necessary data. Getting a complete view of the truth and insightful analysis also requires linking data tables to create a data warehouse, thus, putting a visualization layer on top of it, and deploying it across the enterprise.
After analyzing multiple solutions, eOutdoors found BI4Dynamics. BI4Dynamics offers a tailor-made solution for Dynamics 365 F&O and delivers out-of-the-box data warehousing and business intelligence. Using BI4Dynamics’ 200+ canned dashboards with 2107+ KPIs from Dynamics, eOutdoors has reduced costs, saved time, and greatly improved their ability to analyze their data.
“To solve our reporting challenges and have instant insights to help our business remain competitive, we chose BI4Dynamics. We are extremely satisfied with the performance and insights it has provided since implementation.”
Time Saved Transforming Data
Before implementing BI4Dynamics, eOutdoors relied on a full-time resource dedicated to transforming data and developing visualizations in Power BI. But, even with full-time help, they could only produce one or two monthly reports because of the time it took to extract and transform Dynamics 365 and other system data.
“Even with staff skilled in understanding data and tables in Dynamics and structuring the queries, it still took us several weeks to prepare core data for visualization in Power BI. With BI4Dynamics, dashboards come ready out-of-the-box,” said Patrick.
From Data Validation to Visualization
Before using BI4Dynamics, eOutdoors’ finance team spent a lot of time on data preparation and validation – extraction, loading and transformation (ELT), as well as understanding the 5000+ tables that live within Dynamics 365 F&O. With BI4Dynamics and the Dynamics 365 F&O Data Lake, eOutdoors can now process large groups of tables with expansive data sets and sync them accurately.
Out-of-the-box Power BI reports make the creation and modification of dashboards and visualizations easy. With built-in cubes, analytics, and wizard development tools, BI4Dynamics has offered eOutdoors a fast, reliable, and true plug-and-play analytics solution to replace their existing manual and costly process.
”Before BI4Dynamics we were spending 90% of our time on the ETL process and 10% of the time on data visualization. Now, we are targeting a flip, where 90% will be spend on visualization and only 10% on ETL,” said Patrick.
Increased Market Competitiveness
BI4Dynamics’ fast processing power & delivery of visualized data has helped eOutdoors strengthen its competitiveness in the market.
“COVID has brought exponential growth in our industry. Naturally, the need for fast and reliable reporting has increased. The fast processing of BI4Dynamics has enabled us to leverage and meet our growth targets,” added Patrick.
Fully Supported with BI4Dynamics
Patrick and his team are happy with the relationship they have built with BI4Dynamics and the level of support throughout the implementation and post-launch process.
“The accuracy of BI4Dynamics, helps us get to live data visualization faster than ever before. As a result, our employees, now have deeper insights at their fingertips and use it as a leverage in their day-to-day operation,” added Patrick.
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