Robust BI Features For a Distributor of Chemical Products

Dynamics AX development case study

Company

A European company focused on marketing, sales and logistics of chemicals, polymers, and additives.

Business situation

The Company is trading chemicals throughout Europe. There are several business lines for its wholesale and retail distribution, each of the business lines has thousands of products. The company has warehouses across the European cities. With over 30 years in the industry, the Company is expanding its presence throughout the world, opening local offices and hiring more marketing and sales staff.

It needs to take important business decisions daily in order to efficiently manage sales and logistics: select product groups and goods items for each market, measure employees’ performance, and so on. Their business increasingly requires more rapid and sophisticated information and data analysis to support the decision making process. The business analytics solution can address this challenge. However, the Company’s ERP system, Axapta 2.5, doesn’t offer robust reporting and business intelligence functionality.

Challenges

• In order to address its strategic management accounting needs, the Company needs the ERP system to support reporting and business analytics. The reports have to be developed with external tools, as Axapta 2.5 lacks these features.
• A couple of years after we had customized Axapta 2.5, the Company decided to upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012. The employees were used to working with Axapta 2.5. Therefore, all the modifications had to be re-programmed so that the users don’t get frustrated with the new structure and logic of the reports.

Solutions

The project required plenty of knowledge and effort from Axiopea’s development team to build a sophisticated Dynamics AX Business Intelligence solution.

• Reports and BI. We have extensively modified the financial dimensions in Axapta 2.5 to enable the financial reports and analytics functionality. A variety of reports was developed: reports on products’ profitability, ABC analyzes of product groups, return on investments for locations, evaluation of the sales managers performance and so on.

• Re-implementation. When the Company decided to upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012, all reporting and BI functionality was transferred to the new system. The reports have the same logic as in the legacy system. At the same time, they are created considering the new architecture and functionality of Dynamics AX 2012. The BI tools are very robust, yet clear, intuitive, and don’t require extensive training.

• Performance. The AX reporting works much faster. More important, there is an unlimited number of dimensions that are used to create virtually any kind of reports. The system now enables analyzing important data from different angles.

Results

With Axiopea’s services the Company was able to first add and then to customize the reporting and BI features in Dynamics AX.

• The new functionality helps making important business decisions. The managers always have the up-to-date information at hand.
• Sales, logistics, marketing, and other departments receive custom reports reflecting the crucial data in their field.
• The system’s BI functionality meets the needs of practically any AX user to see, understand and act upon data.

The Company is now confident about its decisions. Reporting and business analytics has improved its efforts in managing logistics, sales, and marketing.

Need to develop Dynamics AX business intelligence solution? Contact us!