How to get the most out of business analytics: Webinar overview

It’s a well-known fact today how becoming more data-driven can give you an edge over your competition or retain customers and keep improving your company’s bottom line. However, implementing analytics is not as easy, more so when you’re working within the Microsoft ecosystem. It is a complex process that involves data cleaning, extraction, modeling, combining and handling massive, multisource data volumes from various sources.

We understand these challenges and our Analytics & Business Intelligence (A&BI) experts at STAEDEAN have conducted a webinar to discuss:

• The market pulse and trends surrounding analytics

• Challenges organizations face when implementing analytics

• How STAEDEAN’s Business Analytics Suite integrated with Dynamics 365 can help

• Live demonstration of Business Analytics Suite

This blog will give you a summary of the entire webinar titled, ‘How to get the most out of business analytics?’.

Know our key speakers

1. Sakshi Dhakad

Product Manager, STAEDEAN

A seasoned product manager, Sakshi believes in the power of data to transform the way businesses operate. Bringing a wealth of experience in leading technology-driven business transformations in the US, Europe, and India, Sakshi can advise you on all things data – from strategy to execution to maintenance.

2. Eric van Hofwegen

Solutions Consultant, STAEDEAN

With over 20 years of experience in the software industry, Eric van Hofwegen is an expert at providing business consultations to our customer and partner networks. He is passionate about assisting our partners and customers by analyzing business requirements, conducting workshops, delivering product specifications on customization, and modeling business processes.

The market pulse and trends surrounding analytics

Marijn Westeneng, our A&BI Sales Specialist and the host, starts with an introduction to the webinar, speakers, and STAEDEAN. Sakshi takes over and kicks the webinar off with some stunning statistics related to market pulse and trends on analytics.

Among the many tangible studies demonstrating the significance of data-driven decisions today, the one by McKinsey shows companies with a more data-driven approach are much likelier to acquire and retain customers and achieve higher revenue.

Challenges organizations face when implementing analytics

A poll conducted in the webinar shows that about 73% of the audience consider data to be extremely critical and a core part of their daily work. While it is a given that being data-driven is a necessity today across organizations, the path to achieving that is not all that easy, especially within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem.

In our last 17 years of experience in the Microsoft ISV world, we see various challenges with our customers: data entities, data management framework, data lakes, and synapse.

Sakshi dives further into what each of these challenges faced by organizations in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem/customer pain points means:

• Dependence/Skills

• Costs & Performance

• Time to Market

• Extensibility

• Quality

How STAEDEAN’s Business Analytics Suite and Dynamics 365 integration can help

Based on our deep research, we built two solutions to help solve customer pain points related to analytics: Data Modeling Studio (DMS) and Business Analytics Suite (BAS). And, in this section of the webinar, Saskhi continues to throw light on how both our solutions help in optimizing your end-to-end analytics lifecycle.

Data Modeling Studio (DMS)

It involves preparing your data overall for analytics. It aims to simplify your data preparation and export experience; no more coding; just simple point and click. It enables business analysts who are inside F&O to ensure highly reliable and performing exports.

DMS features:

• Low code
• Available within Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management
• Unlimited data export
• Better control
• High-performance
• Built-in metadata export

• Preparation to export—all in one solution

Business Analytics Suite (BAS)

To avoid reinventing the wheel, we’ve pre-built analytics that serves as a quick starter (80%) for your specific department or industry.

BAS features:

• Pre-built analytics

• Easily extendable

• Low maintenance effort

• Upcoming Synapse compatibility

• Automation of common tasks to avoid repetitive work

   

  
  

Live demonstration of Business Analytics Suite (BAS)

Moving on, Eric, our solutions consultant, gives a solution demo through a hypothetical case of a company, Moore Ltd., that has grown exponentially and has 30 plants to build food production machines worldwide. As a key challenge, their business needs data-driven insights across key functional departments—sales, finance, projects, production, etc. to make the right decision for further growth.

In the demo, Eric gives a detailed walk-through of how STAEDEAN BAS can help accelerate and optimize their analytics journey.

Do not miss out on the ending of the webinar. That’s where you will find answers to some of these questions from the audience:

Q1. In what ways could a business use analytics to improve the quality of their raw data?

Q2. Does the solution (Business Analytics Suite) work with Business Central?

Q3. In Data Modeling Studio, what is the capability to join tables and build new views across dimensions?

Q4. Without using an SQL server, how can a user accomplish the same goals to filter and manipulate data beyond just selecting fields with the Data Modeling Studio?