BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL

BIO® for Microsoft Dynamics ™ SL is a complete end-to-end business intelligence and reporting solution made expressly for Microsoft Dynamics SL. Whether you need out of the box enhanced financial analysis beyond FRx or a tailored analytics and reporting platform that incorporates third party products and other in-house systems, BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL has a solution for you.

The SL edition of BIO is based on the practical business experience of implementing Dynamics SL in several hundred organizations over 20 years.

BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL is distributed directly from Microsoft and its Partner Channel under the Microsoft BIO Analytics Corp OEM agreement. An add-on which provides advanced functionality is available directly from your Dynamics partner.

The BIO SL framework goes beyond eye appealing dashboards to providing the highest value from the SL database across the different roles and user requirements in your organization.

BIO for Dynamics SL was created to make business intelligence and sophisticated analytics available to the non-technical user.

BIO’s unique features provide benefits right out of the box and its adaptability allows non-technical users to exploit those benefits and tailor the solution to the specific requirements without waiting for IT resources. BIO’s advantages extend to
• Strategic Analysis
• Financial Analysis
• Operational Analysis
• Analytical Accounting

BIO “Out of the Box”
BIO is the only business intelligence and reporting solution for Dynamics SL that has 60 out-of-the-box operational, strategic, and financial views built. Non-technical business users can model information the way they want to see it. They can create their own multi-level roll-ups of accounts, customers, vendors, products, employees, and more, then choose the activities they want to measure. With BIOVue that information is presented in an easy-to-use web-based, self-service interactive environment. BIO does the technical work and generates all the code behind the scenes.

BIO for Dynamics SL is optimized for the specific functionality and architecture of Dynamics SL. Upon installation, BIO self configures to your specific Dynamics SL set-up. This includes recognition of your Flex-Key setups and Project code files.

The BIO solution for SL goes beyond traditional reporting by adding analytical value to almost every transaction stored in the SL database. The mapping or connector to SL provides the deepest and broadest translation of the SL database schema into a value-driven business reporting solution.

Adaptability:
The BIO installation uses the prebuilt SL connector to provide you with an instant BI solution including ready to use views that work with your data. The BIO application also enables a non-technical user to modify the solution to more closely match the organization’s and individual’s requirements. These modifications include the following:

• Modify or create new reporting cubes with relevant Flex-key segments (Subaccount, Inventory, Project, Task etc.).
  
  
• Add or change the dimensions you wish to analyze by.
  
  
• Create and model new reporting dimensions and rollups.
  
  
• Establish drillthrough functionality to transaction level detail with the fields that you deem important.
  
  
• Establish write back functionality that enables financial, customer, vendor, and inventory budget entry and analysis to actual.
  
  
• Define and analyze non traditional time period analysis such as daily, weekly, day of week, rolling periods, and more.
  
  
• Combine and report information from multiple SL databases with different base currencies.

Financial Analysis
BIO for Dynamics SL provides the most flexible and easy to use reporting platform for financial analysis. The BIO platform for financial analysis has many advantages over standard FRx reporting. These advantages include:

• Ease of use
  
  
• Self-service and interactive user experience
  
  
• Integration of financial accounting with customer and vendor accounting
  
  
• Performance
  
  
• Flexibility in time reporting (day, week, day of week, period, month, and more)
  
  
• Web deployment with security by account, segment, and time period
  
  
• Graphical analysis
  
  
• Traffic lighting
  
  
• User defined business rules for exception reporting
  
  
• Ability to capture budget entry

Subaccount segment reporting
One of the strengths of the Dynamics SL platform is the flexibility of Subaccount reporting by segment. BIO maximizes the value of this flexibility. Segment reporting is available across the enterprise including both financial and operational reporting. Segments or segment roll-ups can be used in any reporting cube.

Natural Account Dimension
BIO takes advantage of the Account Class field and ratio group fields in the Chart of Accounts set-up screen as an easy way to create and maintain account roll-ups.

Integration of Financial Analysis and Customer/Vendor Accounting
BIO financial reporting cubes include customer and vendor dimensions. This enables a single truth that starts out with a financial report and provides the support for any account or group of accounts with customer and vendor balances. Drillthrough to transactional detail is also available.

Operational Analytics and Reporting
Operational analytics provide a more granular analysis centered around customer, product, and employee activity. These analytics provide actionable knowledge by identifying trends, changes to trends, product mix analysis, life cycle metrics, retention metrics, company specific metrics and indices, budget analysis, and more. Operational analytics help identify potential issues in a near real time basis and enable the non-technical user to explorer cause and effect.

BIO provides 360-degree operational insight. BIO analysis cuts across the traditional Dynamics SL reporting boundaries that exist between Receivables Management, Payables Management, Sales Order Processing, Purchase Order Processing, Inventory and Projects.

All transactional activity captured in the SL database is mapped to detailed activity types. Activity types are grouped according to business objects like customers, products, locations, and/or user roles such as product and customer managers.

The flexibility of activity mapping is key to enabling almost unlimited operational analysis. See a sample of activity types related to customer:

Project Accounting
BIO drives tremendous value in project driven companies. Companies are using BIO to increase project profitability and accountability with greater insight into project metrics. Following is a sample of project specific client applications:

Providing a Project Manager with a single dashboard with “all” relevant information for projects they manage including:

• Profitability analysis
  
  • Actual\budget\EAC variance analysis
    
  • Over\under serviced analysis (fixed fee)
    
  • Realization
    
  • Resource used analysis
    
  • Task analysis
    
  • AR aging
    
  • Unbilled analysis
    
  • Billing\revenue backlogs
    
  • Weekly burn rate, estimated week to complete
    
    
• Providing departmental managers with “all” relevant information for employees they manage including:
  • Utilization
  • Missing time cards
    
  • Non billable time analysis
    
  • Task analysis by employee
    
  • Least and most productive employee lists
    
  • Labor class analysis
    
    
• Project reporting and analysis across multiple SL databases and currencies
  
  
• Budget and forecast data entry
  
  
• Sector and line of business analysis across projects based on project attributes (PJCode, subaccount segment, and project segment based)
  
  
• Task and sub task analysis across projects