Tribù is a pioneer in the field of modern outdoor furniture. Their philosophy: the terrace and garden should be extensions of the house. Over the years, the Belgian design house has been able to become an internationally acclaimed brand, with furniture shipped to more than 60 countries and annual revenues of about 30 million €.
Customer Challenges
To improve its operational business processes, Tribù decided to implement an ERP System and chose a Microsoft Dynamics BC-based Enterprise Resource Planning. Next to that, the company implemented Salesforce as CRM.
Thanks to Business Central, all of Tribù's financial and operational data was centralized in one database. It was also the case with its Salesforce CRM data, but in another database.
Tribù had now access to a rich amount of data and wanted to have a 360° Analytical view to further grow the company. Having been used to manually putting and transforming data into Microsoft Excel and then creating reports from it, Tribù wanted to simplify the reporting & analysis process.
Reporting via Excel spreadsheets can lead to many problems, one of which being the plethora of disconnected reports created and the struggle it is to share them with users. Tribù was therefore looking for a solution that could enable its employees to create interactive Business Intelligence reports and visual dashboards and share them among users via both browser and on mobile devices.
Solution
After an extended market research of potential solutions, Tribù selected the Dynamics Business Central/NAV "Out-of-the-Box" Power BI solution from element61 for both its ERP and Salesforce CRM data.
element61's Business Central/NAV Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" solution is a pre-packaged Business Intelligence (BI) solution that is based on Navision/Business Central as a source. It provides many viewpoints on business data, is open for extension and provides a 360° view of all the data gathered, in this use case from both BC and Salesforce CRM.
Our pre-packaged data warehouse solution was set up using standard Microsoft Analytics technology.
As Tribù had chosen Power BI as its reporting and dashboarding tool, interactive visualizations were created and users were able to create their own reports through a simple user interface and to share them via the Cloud.
In order to create an environment that enables users to create their own reports, the solution features a semantic layer between the data warehouse and the Power BI reporting environment. This layer is built in Microsoft Analysis Services through the use of the Tabular model feature, a model holding all the calculations and business logic that ensures fast and performant analysis and reporting.
The solution that Tribù chose - Dynamics BC/NAV Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" with standard financial reports - was implemented in 5 working days after the project start. Tribù could therefore go live with its Business Intelligence project in less than a week!
After the success of the implementation of the Finance domain, Tribù was convinced by element61's Dynamics Business Central/NAV Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" approach. The company decided to integrate other data and modules to their Business Intelligence project including the modules Inventory, Sales and Purchase.
The data warehouse was then quickly extended with these new domains resulting in a unique, single source of truth environment. It enabled everyone within the company to base their business decisions on the same data.
Technology
The solution was built through the use of the Microsoft Business Intelligence & Analytics stack.
From the beginning, Power BI was used to create interactive reports and dashboards. The Tabular model can also be accessed through Microsoft Excel.
Role of element61
element61 was in charge of:
The installation and configuration of all standard components of the Dynamics Business Central/NAV BI "Out-of-the-Box", delivered in 5 working days per module.
The integration of Salesforce CRM data within the existing predefined data warehouse.
The building of the Tabular model for analysis.
The creation of a first set of reports and dashboards in Power BI and power user training.
Conclusion
The BI platform delivered, provides Tribù with insights into its ERP and CRM data. The company is now able to exploit the full potential of their data, allowing it to take quicker and more effective decisions.
Thanks to its intuitiveness and user-friendliness, the users of Power BI can have a better view of their data through the use of the "Out-of-the-Box" platform. They are therefore no longer reliant on IT for creating reports and can use the data gathered in one single repository to make smarter business decisions.
Comments