In this blog post we wish to provide a short explanation of our MicroSoft Navision BI Solution which is under development.
For the last 3+ years we have been providing 24×7 support for our Romanian development partner.
Today this development partner has 280+ retail stores and sells 300,000 to 400,000 items in their stores each day.
The data warehouse is on SQL Server Standard Edition running on a 16 core server for the data in the staging area and data warehouse.
The time span of the data goes back to 2012 and we are able to support analytics for sales and finance back to 2012 based on this data warehouse.
The ERP they use is MicroSofts Navision.
We have also implemented a full staging area taking all the data from their Navision ERP and placing it in to the staging area on the data warehouse machine.
We take incremental extracts from the production system two times per day and we run these through a delta detection process to apply inserts and updates to the staging are to keep the staging area in sync with the production ERP system.
This means the customer has 100% of their ERP production data available in the staging area to query with any tool they please and therefor no extra load is placed on to the production system for ad-hoc and “one time” queries.
The ETL system was developed by another Romanian based company and was written with SQL Server stored procedures.
We have not replaced these stored procedures with our BIDA ETL. However, we have done new development using our BIDA ETL.
We migrated the processing schedules from purely stored procedures across to our BIDA Scheduler to be able to run portions of the ETL in parallel to reduce the over all ETL elapsed time.
Given this three years of experience we naoe have very good skills with Navision.
As a result we have decided to bring to market a Navision Business Intelligence Solution.
Our Navision BI Solution is under development on Navision Version 2009.
We have completed the development of the staging area and the main business entities for retailers.
For example we have the following fact tables completed in development:
- Customer Ledger Header
- Customer Ledger Txn
- Fixed Asset Ledger Txn
- GL Account Balance
- GL Account Txn
- Outlet Sale Header
- Outlet Sale Txn
- PO Receipt Header
- PO Receipt Line
- Return Header
- Return Line
- Sale Txn
- Store Payment Component Txn
- Vendor Ledger Header
- Vendor Ledger Txn
We have also implemented the mechanisms for managing summaries for sales with incremental updates of the summaries.
The proposal for the Navision BI Solution is to move ALL DATA from the Navision ERP rather than to move a limited amount of data.
We will deliver the initial suite of reports in Excel using the Meta5 product because Excel is pervasively used in Navision customers we have talked with.
During our start up phase we are going to limit the number of customers for our Navision BI Solution to five.
We will focus on our first five customers to get them implemented and supported properly while we hire and train some of the “best and brightest” graduates to support our local Romanian customers.
We will soon be releasing marketing materials on Navision BI Solution.
If you are running any version of Navision and you would like to ask us any questions about our planned Navision BI Solution?
Please put your best email address in the form below.
You have space to ask any question you would like on the form as well.
