Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides powerful, scalable, enterprise business intelligence capability… but with everyday usability. It’s a single, complete solution to meet your NAV reporting and BI needs.
Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics lets you take a "buy, not build" approach. We provide everything you need to get up and running immediately – comprehensive packaged analytics so you have dashboards and reports from day one, Zap CubeXpress to fast track creation of an optimized NAV data warehouse, and a user-friendly web interface that requires no software installation for end-users.
Microsoft NAV dashboards
Dashboards provide an instant visual snapshot of performance. Most companies use role-based dashboards, for instance the CEO views an executive dashboard across different functions covering the entire organization, whereas regional sales managers view sales analysis just for their territory. Dashboards must be easy to configure and customize to meet the varied needs of your users. Zap’s NAV dashboards offer: |
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- Drag-and-drop creation – Users simply drag-and-drop NAV reports, charts, KPIs, scorecards and rich text onto dashboards – no programming is required.
- Dynamic resizing – Layout adjustments are automatic, such as resizing charts to fit a dashboard cell, and dynamically resizing an entire dashboard to suit the user’s screen resolution.
- Guided analytics – Any cell within a dashboard can be sliced by any other cell in the dashboard; meaning users can easily navigate the data based on their own personal requirements.
- Drill down for detail – You can drill down from a dashboard to lower level reports for more detail.
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Microsoft NAV reports, charts, and analysis
Zap's Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics provides flexible, self-service NAV reporting that improves the accuracy and efficiency of your reporting processes. Automate your NAV reporting workflows to improve the timeliness of information and empower your team to move beyond manual reporting and provide more strategic analysis that will impact the bottom line. Unlike many alternatives, you use a single solution for both reporting and analysis, which ensures minimal administration and training overhead.
Drag-and-drop functionality includes: |
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- Management reports – Use a powerful, central interface to automate and streamline NAV management reporting. Select reports, scorecards, dashboards and charts into a report pack, add images, title pages, a table of contents, and explanatory text, and create a PDF. Reports are automatically refreshed on open with the latest data, including fields within report explanations.
- Flexible list and aggregate reports – Stop the use of unsecured spreadsheets by providing powerful NAV reporting functionality in a central web environment.
- Ad-hoc analysis – Move beyond reports that just tell you ‘what’ happened, to analyze the ‘why’ behind performance. Users can answer any question at any time by exploring multidimensional data from many different perspectives by filtering, drilling down, slicing, and dicing.
- What-if analysis – Allow users to easily model different scenarios.
- Deep drill-through – Navigate your data on the fly to find answers to even the most complex questions, without having to write new reports. You can even drill through on calculated members and by selecting multiple cells within a report.
- Slicing – Slice data easily, presenting only what is relevant based on slice selections already made.
- Real time NAV reports – Gain all the benefits from Reporting Services
reports while providing users with a single reporting environment. Integrate real time reports and geo maps from Reporting Services
in your Zap reports and dashboards, and slice them by any
dimension.
- Flexible functions – The solution comes with extensive
pre-defined formulas to help users with common
calculations, such as days sales outstanding and
bottom inventory count. These in-built functions
range from formulas for relative time, to statistical
functions and OLAP operations, adding powerful
functionality to even the most basic cubes. It’s easy
to add your own custom functions, from simple
drag-and-drop to complex functions in MDX, and
then share them with users and groups.
- Visualization – Add a chart to a Navision report in a
single click, choose from a wide range of charts,
and make your chart 3D. See hotspots in your data
with conditional formatting and heatmaps.
- Automated NAV report scheduling – Schedule the automatic distribution of reports, knowing that security will be automatically applied so that users only see authorized data, even for PDF management reports.
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Microsoft NAV Key Performance Indicators
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are individual metrics that measure performance against target. Zap’s NAV KPIs offer: |
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- Drag-and-drop creation – Users simply drag their calculations and measures onto a KPI. No coding is required.
- Flexibility to customize – Users can set anchors, choosing whether ‘less is good’ or ‘more is good’ on their KPI. They can also add extra needles to supplement the actual and target figures.
- Dynamic calculations – Boundaries and target figures can be dynamically calculated, which is useful when using KPIs within filtered dashboards.
- Flexible formatting – Zap provides a wide range of gauges and options so users can customize the look and feel of their KPIs.
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Microsoft NAV Scorecards
Scorecards are a collection of key performance indicators (KPIs) to provide an at-a-glance snapshot of performance against targets. They highlight what you had aimed to achieve, and what the difference is between objectives and results. Zap's MS NAV scorecards are fully configurable and provide: |
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- Drag-and-drop creation – Users simply drag KPIs onto their scorecard.
- Drill through – Scorecards can be linked to underlying data so that users can click through to investigate problem areas further.
- Weighted KPIs – Weight issues within a scorecard by importance, and then sort the scorecard to ensure you view the most important areas first.
- Additional metrics – You’re not just restricted to showing metrics for past, current, and target figures – add extra columns such as same period last year, or trend for the quarter.
- Automatic creation from hierarchies – Save time creating detailed scorecards. Simply create a KPI at the top level of a hierarchy, and have KPIs automatically created for the dimension members you select. This enables you to pinpoint exactly which area is affecting an overall KPI by viewing the products and departments that contribute to the overall figure. For example, view expenses by actual vs budget and see each individual department’s contribution.
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Alerts and report scheduling
Alerts and report scheduling provide an early warning system to notify users about changes in performance. They help to automate discovery and learning, and remove the task of manually monitoring performance and providing updates. This fully configurable functionality includes: |
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- Alerts – Notify users of key changes – to KPIs, such as gross margin falling under target, or a new sale being made; to resources such as reports; or based on scheduled events, such as sending an alert each morning about new sales made the previous day.
- Alerts with insight – Alerts can be sent with contextual reports, to immediately highlight the cause of the change.
- Flexible distribution and subscription – The same NAV report can be scheduled to run multiple times with different parameters, formats, frequencies, and destinations. Report distribution is based on a combination of events and timeframes. Your Zap users can also choose to subscribe to existing reports to gain more control over the information they need.
- Security automatically applied – Individual user security is automatically applied to any analytics that are distributed with an alert, even for PDF management reports.
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Zap CubeXpress
The most time consuming and resource intensive part of a BI project is creating and maintaining the underlying cube to suit your individual needs. Zap CubeXpress is a tool that fast tracks building a Microsoft NAV data warehouse to produce an optimized OLAP cube ready for immediate use. With an easy, wizard-driven interface, Zap CubeXpress greatly reduces the technical resources you need to get started, with some Zap customers cutting cube creation time from months to as little as a single day. Capabilities include: |
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- Automatic identification of your Dynamics NAV customizations, relationships and data usage to ensure you create an optimized cube.
- Replication of your Dynamics NAV security so users only see appropriate data.
- Optimization of your NAV data for multi-dimensional analysis and reporting, including cross ledger analysis (for example a Days of Supply report drawing information from the sales, inventory and purchasing ledgers).
- Multiple companies can be loaded into a single reporting environment.
- Scheduled updates to run at any time to refresh your cube.
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Extending and sharing
Extend and share Zap's Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics as much as you need to. |
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- Extend the online help – You can extend the online help to add new tips and tricks, explanations, meta-tags or even videos within the application.
- Multi-tenancy – Use a single deployment of Zap to serve multiple organizations.
- Multilingual – Zap's architecture supports the automatic presentation of the solution in the user's local language. Currently, English, Simplified Chinese and Danish versions are available, with more to come in the near future.
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Business Templates
Re-usable business templates transform the way you use BI. They drastically reduce the time and technical resources you need to create and maintain custom analytics. Use templates to shorten the lifespan of your BI project – and gain immediate results that impact the bottom line. |
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How do templates work? Typically, you hard code business logic into reports, which restricts you from easily re-using this logic across other analytics, or other deployments. But with Zap's Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics, you build your business logic into a layer of building blocks that serve as the foundation for analytics. Change this foundation layer, and all analytics are updated in an instant. Create an entire suite of business templates based on the foundation layer, and you can easily share them across territories, companies, and even entirely different deployments of the solution – you simply map the foundation layer and all the analytics automatically fall into place. For example, pre-define account ranges for reports, so that there is no manual selection or maintenance for individual report creators. Or, create corporate templates for any type of analytic – such as dashboards, reports, KPIs, and scorecards – and ensure that they are used consistently throughout your organization.
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