One of the great things about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is that it’s really unified with the Microsoft’s full stack of ERP and business productivity applications. Built on the Azure platform, all applications in the Microsoft ecosystem – like Microsoft Power BI, Flow, Power apps, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – work well together and have seamless out-of-the-box integration.
In a recent demo of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Tensoft COO Dan Berube demonstrated how Microsoft Power BI works with Business Central. The following is an excerpt from this video, providing a quick overview of Microsoft Power BI dashboard including reporting capabilities, examples of just some of the different visualizations available in the dashboard, and the seamless interaction with both Business Central and Excel.
The following is a partial transcription of the video above:
“For the next couple of minutes here we will be in the Power BI service to give you guys an idea of what Power BI can do as well as kind of looking at where the data can come from.
So, Power BI in itself is a great place for your reports and dashboards. There was a lot of talk in the last conversation about that data potentially being in a lot of different places. Power BI can connect to probably all of those places. So, we have an ERP system or maybe we have a support ticketing system or maybe your sales guys do want to have a different CRM system. Power BI would be a place where we can connect to those things and bring that data together providing you insights and information about what’s happening within your organization.
What we’re looking at here is the Power BI Pro. Just so you know, there are really two main components to Power BI Pro. There’s the desktop portion, which is for the power user – that person who’s going to be writing and collecting that data – and then the Power BI service which is where users can view, comment and share that information as well as interact with that information.
So, we’ll be kind of focused on that last part here looking at information interacting with that information through a series of reports that we have published in Power BI. As Bob mentioned, this is kind of our demo data for what we have out here. Again, your focus and data points may be different than what you’ll see here, but generally from an interaction perspective these things would be common across Power BI.
So, we’re looking at just a reporting dashboard here. We have a series of reports across the bottom. We have a lot of tabs here. One nice thing here is I can quickly get to any of those sections as I need to without having to scroll back and forth through them. So, we can right click in our in our toolbar there and get the reports as we need them.
When we’re looking at a particular dashboard, we can have multiple visualizations. You can see we have some charts. We have some grids. We can combine, mix these up, as we need to on our reports depending on who our audience is. What’s nice about these panels is they react to each other. So, what I mean by that is let’s say we want to know just what’s going on with Cisco for our bookings. By clicking on Cisco, all of my other elements will change and be filtered to that element. So, this is what that Power BI user can do and really when they build those reports link these things up to each other. So, when people are asking questions or looking for specific data, one choice can impact the other choices that we see.
Other type of things that we can do inside a Power BI- look at some other visualizations here, but we also have the ability to drill into data if we want that underlying raw data. Like somebody really wants everything behind that’s driving some of these visualizations. We can pick for example here: we’ll look at the margin for Q3 of 2016. If we right click on there we can drill through to the details that make that up and I will take us to another portion of our report catalog take us to the report but also filter it based on our selection from the previous report. We can have links within a particular report or we can have links across reports so that when somebody drills in those filters are brought forward to the next report…”
For more information on Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, contact us today.