NHV Group is one of the largest European helicopter operators, with a strong geographic
presence in the North Sea and Western Africa. NHV specializes in the transport of crews, loads and supplies for the energy producing industry.
Customer Challenges
In 2019, NHV made the decision of switching their accounting software to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. They also wanted to take this opportunity to implement a new reporting solution, going from a traditional financial reporting based on exports to Excel to a modern and dynamic dashboarding solution. As their budget was going to be maintained in Business Central, they also needed to be able to easily compare actuals with budget.
As explained, NHV is present in different countries and does transactions in a number of currencies. Therefore, the financial reports were needed in local currency, transaction currency and EUR and the business users needed to be able to quickly switch between them with a simple slicer. As year-to-date exchange rates had to be taken into account for the conversion to EUR, additional logic was required.
The dimension code used in Business Central needed to be divided into four parts: country, base, segment, department. NHV wanted to have access to an application enabling them to do the split-up themselves for every code. The company had also asked to avoid transferring data from their old accounting system to Business Central. In order to still be able to report on historical data and have a continued trend analysis, this historical data had to be directly transferred to the data warehouse layer of the "Out-of-the-Box" solution.
Solution
Amongst all the candidates, NHV decided to put its trust in element61 and our Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" for Dynamics Business Central/NAV.
Our Business Central/NAV BI “Out-of-the-Box” solution is a pre-packaged Business Intelligence solution that provides many viewpoints on business data. The solution works for all versions of Navision and Business Central, integrating data very rapidly from Navision and Business Central in a data warehouse.
Standard Microsoft Azure technology is used to set up the pre-packaged data warehouse of the solution.
The reporting and dashboarding solution is Power BI. Through Microsoft Power BI, users can easily create their own reports and share them via the cloud thanks to interactive visualizations and a simple user interface.
Users were also able to see previous, historical data (from the old ERP) and Business Central data within the same reporting solution.
Interactive reports were created based on NHV's needs. Next to this, an income statement and balance sheet were created based on the provided layout from NHV. Figures in local currency, transaction currency and EUR were made available. Other measures were also added to allow users to easily compare actuals with budget.
As mentioned, it was important to use a year-to-date (YTD) exchange rate for the conversion to EUR. A correction was therefore needed every month following the month of the transaction. If we have a transaction for 100 USD at an exchange rate of 0.9 in January and the exchange rate is 0.8 in February, then in February there has to be a correction of -10 (0.8 * 100 - 0.9 * 100). This had to be done every month and was implemented using SQL logic.
An app enabling the split-up the dimension code in four parts was developed through Microsoft PowerApps. Microsoft PowerApps makes it possible for users to create apps without using any code, which allowed the new app to be set up quickly. The latter was integrated into the "Out-of-the-Box" data warehouse, enabling users to do the mapping in PowerApps and have it synced automatically with the reporting solutions.
Technology
The full Microsoft Business Intelligence stack was used for the development.
Microsoft PowerApps was used for the mapping of the dimension codes.
Power BI was used from the very beginning to create interactive reports and dashboards. The Tabular model can also be accessed through Microsoft Excel and Reporting Services.
Role of element61
element61 was in charge of:
The installation and configuration of all standard components of the Dynamics Business Central/NAV Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" solution, delivered in three working days per module.
The set-up of the Tabular model for analysis.
The creation of the first set of reports and dashboards in Power BI.
Conclusion
Thanks to the new reporting solution that has been implemented, NHV has a better view of its financial data. The Power BI reports that have been created also allow managers and employees to spend less time tracking down information. Given that these Power BI reports have been developed with the most relevant data, they can act quickly and analyse trends with both their old and new Business Central data gathered in one central warehouse.
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