I’ve had years of experience in the consultative selling world of IT, hardware, software, and professional services. My clients are located in both the private commercial sector and public sector arenas. I recently switched to selling business applications, and although most of my knowledge transferred, there have been some new twists.
- First you have to create the new company. To create the new company, navigate to System>Management>Manage>Companies
- Click the + sign to add the new company, the system will generate a new Company ID
- In the Login Name field type the name of the new company
Forecasting, budgeting, business planning; what is the big deal? It is an important topic and at our User Conference, we had sessions and speakers talking about this. In the past, some mid-sized and most small companies have managed to grow and be profitable without formal planning and strategic visions. For some executives, budgeting and planning seems like a lot of wasted effort to creating fictional numbers that are a guess today and completely irrelevant in six months!
In this blog, I wanted to provide a little insight into what it is like to be a Consultant at KTL Solutions and shed a little light on what our user conference is all about from a consulting perspective. I have been working at KTL Solutions as a Senior Business Consultant for a little over three years. In this capacity I have been implementing and supporting Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and PaperSave along with many third party add-ons. Prior to working at KTL Solutions, I was also implementing and supporting ERP systems for about 20 years.
The Power BI preview released by Microsoft in Convergence provided a great tool to quickly make sense of large amounts of data. Power BI does all the heavy lifting and provides a quick and easy way to interact with the data. As promised by Microsoft with the release of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 CRM is now available within PowerBI alongside SalesForce & Google Analytics to gather data and provide data analysis. As of publishing this article the Power BI Dynamics CRM connector will only work with Dynamics CRM Online, it will not work with an on premise CRM installation, hopefully the on premise connectivity is not too far.
1. More SaaS (Software as a Service, Storage as a Service)
I myself had no idea what cloud could do or even what cloud service means. Here is what I learned; cloud service is a manner of using the internet to save, manage and process data. For example, Amazon and IBM already take advantage of cloud services to manage and secure their company files. But don’t be fooled, small businesses can use and benefit from a cloud computing system. How? A cloud service can save time, resource as well as provide flexibility and security for any business size.
This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.
Microsoft has a great new offering, Power BI Designer Preview, as part of the Power BI platform. It is a standalone Windows Desktop application that can be downloaded from the Power BI site. It is an optional Power BI content authoring option for users that are unable to upgrade to the latest version of Excel. The application combines Power Query, Power Pivot Data Model and Power View into a seamless experience that will allow users to build their Power BI dashboards and reports.
I often get asked about Business Intelligence and related tools, as dashboards and data integration have become so common today, and everyone wants “instant information”. After all, aren’t we all information workers today?
Since my company is a Microsoft Partner, doing Dynamics (GP, SL and CRM) business applications, my first recommendation is to “look close to home”. You may be surprised how much existing BI you already own and are not utilizing if you use Microsoft products. (Dynamics, SQL, SharePoint, Office) The Microsoft BI toolkit is not a lightweight player in the BI market, as you can see from the 2013 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant graphic below.
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