We all want to be more “data-driven,” but what does that term really mean? According to a recent Forbes article, a data-driven company makes better decisions and optimizes business performance “by fully embracing data.” That means every decision is based on accurate numbers and reports—not opinions or gut instinct.
Organizations that are focused on developing a data-driven culture are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times more likely to retain customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable (McKinsey Global Institute). As businesses around the world continue producing and collecting more and more data every day, it’s time to use those insights towards improved business operations, better relationship building, and strategic decision making.
Although we can all appreciate the importance of making actionable, timely decisions, the reality is that our ability to report and analyze data depends entirely on the technology and governance we have in place.
For most companies in this day and age, data doesn’t live in one location. You have data in your ERP solution, your CRM system, and you’ve likely got a budget in an Excel file somewhere. All of these disparate data sources and standalone datasets make it impossible to report on accurately and cohesively without a data management platform to bring it all together.
Here are some of the most common pain points with any business intelligence (BI) deployment:
- Disparate Data Sources — your data is everywhere, so you need a centralized platform to consolidate and manage it all.
- Long Development Cycles — it takes time and effort to handwrite code and build tables!
- Rigid Structure — small changes result in a cascade of rigid and complex table updates and script views (which easily result in errors).
- Expensive Costs — data scientists, data engineers, and developers are highly-trained and not cheap.
- Fragmented Datasets — not all datasets are error-free, and data quality can have a huge impact on reporting.
- Non-Standardized Coding — more than one person runs the risk of having different people’s “language” in those codes.
Reporting and BI software only work effectively when you have a data warehouse to get your data to an accessible level to work with it. Data warehouses are designed to extract data from your existing databases and multiple data sources, specify a set of rules to transform that data, and then load it into a central location that you use to access and report on. While some businesses decide to invest in building their own data warehouse (which we don’t advise unless you have the time, money, and expertise), there are some great automated data management platforms out there to help you reduce some of the pains listed above and get a head start.
At Tigunia, we specialize in helping Microsoft Dynamics ERP customers better manage, report, and analyze their data. One of the easiest ways to simplify your databases and capitalize on a data warehouse is by using an automated data management platform, like TimeXtender.
Create a Single Version of Truth Using TimeXtender
Your ability to become “data-driven” is based purely on how well your business can extract insight, analyze, and act on data. And that’s exactly what TimeXtender is designed to do.
TimeXtender is an automated data management platform that allows you to easily connect multiple data sources in a single data warehouse and/or data model that prepares your data for analytics and BI. This will result in easily accessible reports and dashboards, reliable and consistent data, and faster decision-making that drives performance improvement.
By eliminating the need to manually stitch together a patchwork of tools for data access, modeling, and compliance, TimeXtender is an all-in-one reporting platform that you need to create a modern data estate that naturally evolves as data volume increases and technology advances. Using metadata to orchestrate your solution from beginning to end enables building data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts 10x faster than any other solution on the market today. Here are some of its other benefits:
- Code-free UI enables 10x faster deployment
- Easily adapts to changing platforms and data sources
- No code environment required
- Provides a single source of truth
- Minimizes the time it takes for people to validate and reconcile reports
- Simplifies cloud-scale analytics (including Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks, etc.)
Watch Business Reporting with TimeXtender Webinar
To show you how the business reporting platform works, our Director of Business Intelligence, Ryan Paterson, recently hosted a detailed webinar with Taylor Hagin from TimeXtender. They discuss the importance of data warehouse automation in faster business reporting and smarter decision–making, and they dive into the details of how it works.
In this 45-minute webinar, you will learn:
- How TimeXtender can interact with data (3 levels: Operational Data Exchange, Modern Data Warehouse, Semantic Models)
- How the TimeXtender platform works, with a live demonstration of its:
- User interface
- Data sources and the ODX server Business logic and the MDQ
- Data visualization and the semantic models
- Documentation and data lineage
At Tigunia, our talented business intelligence and reporting team can help design and customize your TimeXtender implementation and reports. If you’re interested in learning more about TImeXtender and how it can fit into your Microsoft Dynamics environment, contact us for more information.