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Implementation Specialists

Microsoft Gold ERP Partner in Minnesota

IS Services

Ways you can use Power BI

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Oftentimes we can understand the benefits of a particular system, but we hesitate because it is not as easy to see how the system can be used to benefit our situation. With that in mind we have created a few example reports to give you some ideas on Power BI reports that you could use. These reports are all available for you to purchase and they can also be customized to fit your individual business needs.

In all our example reports we are connected to data from Microsoft Dynamics GP, so if you use that system these reports could work for you.

Sales Report

With sales reports you can see how current sales compares to the sales from the last period or last year. See progress towards yearly goal, your top 10 items and customers and view total sales by location, territory and salesperson.

Contracts Report

View current contract details by division, customer and individual contract. Track average increase year over year and keep tabs on when contracts are expiring.

 

 

 

Job Cost Report

Keep tabs on cost versus revenue and billing for jobs. Drill in to see the breakdown of costs by cost type.

 

 

Service Report

With service reporting you can track service calls and appointments by type, date and division. View cost versus billing and identify where improvement is needed.

 

 

AR and Cash Balance Report

With the accounts receivable report you can view customer balances by aging, city and salesperson. Also, view overall cash balance by account.

GP Content Pack

This is a basic report showing data in finance, inventory, purchasing and sales.

 

 

 

These reports are a wonderful way to start utilizing Power BI and give you an insight on how this tool can benefit your team. As a reminder all these reports can be customized to fit your individual needs or be used as a jumping off point for designing a custom report tailored specifically to your organization.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

Why should you use a CRM system?

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CRM, stands for customer relationship management, and if you have customers you definitely should be using a CRM system. Let’s take a look at a few benefits of using a CRM system.

Data Organization

When data is housed in different locations it can be a hassle to piece together the current status of a company. With a CRM system you can store data in one location reducing the need to chase down bits and pieces of information.

Analytics

With data in one location you can quickly perform analysis, set goals and measure performance against those goals. Trends can be quickly identified and effective reporting can help drive business decisions.

Target Marketing

Effective marketing requires two things, getting your information in front of the right people and a seamless transfer of potential leads to the sales team. With a CRM system you can group customers and prospects easily to create custom marketing campaigns. Tracking this data within the system means potential leads can be easily transferred to the sales team.

Well-Defined Sales Pipeline

A CRM system allows you to prioritize leads and opportunities and helps with tracking activities to prevent potential sales from being neglected. Allowing the system to handle juggling all the data will keep your sales pipeline flowing. As you build up historical data forecasting sales will also become easier.

Better Customer Service

Customer retention lives on product value and customer service. If you track data within a CRM system you can view all the interactions a customer has had with your company and they are not forced to explain everything they have purchased or work they have done with you. High customer satisfaction can become an invaluable marketing tool for any company.

Employee Efficiency

Often overlooked, but extremely important, a CRM system can help with employee efficiency. Your employees will not have to spend time looking through multiple systems for information and they can get up to speed on customers quicker. A well-thought out system should always be designed for how it can best serve your employees to make their jobs easier and faster to complete.

Here at Implementation Specialists we work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and we have found it to be a system that can suit any type of business. Between what is available out of the box and the abundant customization capabilities it can be made into a personalized system that will help your business perform better and grow with your company.

If you are interested in looking at this CRM system browse through our blog posts, view historical webinars, or reach out for a personal demo.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

 

Join Jerica an upcoming CRM Webinar. If you can’t attend, still register and we will send you a copy of the recording.

February 10 – CRM: How to have a successful implementation 

March 17 – CRM: Working with Accounts

 

 

Benefits of Power BI

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Power BI has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but some out there might still be wondering why they should use this tool. Reporting within any organization is important as it can give look at the overall health and performance of your business, spot trends and potential problems and be used for forecasting future opportunities.

Features of Power BI

Power BI has too many features to talk about in one article, but here are the basics you need to know.

With Power BI you can connect to multiple sources and pull them together in a single report. This eliminates the need to piece together reports from multiple systems.

Available visuals, analytics and formatting capabilities allow reports to be extremely customized and provide ways to interact with the data allowing end-users the ability to dig into the results and look at it in multiple ways.

Using Power BI Pro data can be kept up to date with automatic refreshes. No more waiting for a month end report, you can see where you are at daily or even multiple times a day as long as data is being entered into the respective systems.

Now that we’ve reviewed a few key features let’s look at 4 benefits to using Power BI.

Saves Time

Gone are the days when an administrative assistant will need to manually run a report or gather the data and put it together in a single report for their respective teams. With Power BI once the connections are established getting the data can be as easy as logging into a Power BI Pro account to view current stats or, if not using automatic refreshes, it can be a simple click of the refresh button to pull in current numbers.

With the ability to drill down into data managers will no longer have to ask for more information in understanding what is feeding the numbers they can simply drill into a particular data point and get down to the individual transactions behind those numbers, helping them pinpoint issues.

Customizable Experience

Everyone has a certain way they like to see things and with Power BI you can avoid the hassle of creating multiple versions of the same report or trying to get everyone on board with one person’s viewpoint on how the data should be presented.

End-users can establish dashboards and favorites to easily navigate to the visuals they are interested in or be granted the capability to make their own reports from a dataset.

Security levels can be set so one report is created and end-users can be granted permissions to only see data applicable to them.

Higher End-User Buy-In

This is the hope of every report creator that their hard work and time will not be in vain by having a bunch of reports that no one really looks at or uses. With Power BI the ease of navigation, interactivity of reports and the ability to keep reports up to date have dramatically increased end-user buy-in when it comes to reporting.

Power BI Pro also carries the ability to see how many views and who is viewing your reports so you can quickly identify who may not be utilizing the reports and coach them appropriately.

Become Proactive vs. Reactive

Once you have end-user buy-in good reporting starts to pay off as you can make the switch from reacting and putting out fires to proactively changing course as you identify both positive and negative trends. If you are reviewing up to date data you can see a project starting to perform badly and take appropriate action in the middle versus waiting until the end of the project and just trying to do better the next time.

If you are interested in checking out these or some of the other awesome benefits of Power BI check out our library of webinars, other blog posts or reach out to schedule a demo of Power BI.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

2020 Recap: A Year of Flexibility and Change

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I think we can all agree, 2020 was a wild ride!

March brought uncertainty, flexibility and change as most businesses moved to working from home. Here at Implementation Specialists, over half of our employees work remote, so not much change happened in our office. We are so grateful that our team already had Teams meetings regularly scheduled and were familiar with communicating virtually.

In April, Key2Act’s Synergy event was a little different this year. As much as we enjoy attending the event in-person and connecting face-to-face with others in the industry, we understand why Synergy moved to an online event. We’re already looking forward to virtual Synergy 2021.

August brought our 13th annual Geeks on the Green customer appreciation event. Even though we didn’t host our annual lunch, a great social-distancing time was had with lots of outdoor golfing and prizes. We can’t wait for our annual 14th Geeks on the Green in 2021 and hoping our event can return to ‘normal’.

Fall is always a busy time around Implementation Specialists as our team was busy gearing up for our annual Great Plains User Conference and K2A Days. This year was our event went virtual and was our largest attended GPUC yet, with over 200 attendees! The virutal aspect of the event was such a hit with attendees from all over the US and Canada that we will continue to offer a virtual aspect to future GPUC events. This year featured over 100 sessions revolving around GP, wsTOOLS, CRM, Power BI and more. For 2021, we’re already busy planning an in-person AND virtual event. If you haven’t registered, you can do so here.

2021

Our team is very excited for what’s to come in 2021. We are all very much looking forward to the new year with exciting things to come. We’re taking a short break on our webinar series due to the Holiday’s, but will resume our normal schedule, starting Wednesday, January 6th.

Thank you for your continued support of Implementation Specialists and a big thank you to our team for a great year. We look forward to what we will accomplish in 2021!

GPUC 2020: Benefits for Attending

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I think it is safe to say that 2020 has thrown everyone for a loop. As we come to the end of this year it is worth spending some time planning how to set ourselves up for the best possible 2021. One way to help your organization is to attend our annual GPUC training event as a company.

Company passes allow for an unlimited number of employees within an organization to attend our event, so more than ever GPUC can benefit your entire team.

With our event being held virtually this year the experience will be slightly different, but we will have some additional benefits from this change.

1. No Travel

One benefit of a virtual event is that there will be no need to travel to Fargo, ND in November. Reduction in travel costs could afford the opportunity for more employees to attend the event. An employee that cannot travel or that only needs to attend one or two sessions can now benefit from those training opportunities without having to justify travel costs.

2. Multiple Training Paths

With a variety of session types covering GP, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM), Power BI, SSRS and Excel there is a training session for you no matter what your role. Explore the GPUC schedule to review sessions and content on our website.

3. Recorded Sessions

Although we want you to attend the event live another benefit of a virtual event is that our sessions will be recorded and can be viewed by attendees later. Something that is not available in a live event is to attend multiple sessions that our occurring at the same time, but this year you can attend one session and watch the other session later.

4. Networking

My favorite part of every GPUC I have attended is how bringing a group of people together creates change by brainstorming and networking how to solve problems and answer questions. It is very easy with a virtual event to become disengaged or just save the recordings to watch later, but the true value of GPUC comes from all attendees participating. I highly encourage everyone to attend their session live and provide as much feedback as you can.

If there is one thing 2020 has brought to the forefront it is the need to be adaptable to any situation. Now more than ever we all have the chance to lead the way in creating new solutions and processes that can make business run smoother even in the most tumultuous times. I invite you to register for GPUC, take advantage of the company pass to give every employee the training they need and be an active participant helping lead the way into 2021.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant

 

XRM: Managing Time Off Requests Through Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

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Time off requests can cause a lot of headaches and it’s an important subject for your employees. Having a simple and efficient process for requesting and responding to time off is a huge benefit.

An out of the box time off request and calendar exists within the field service app and you can bring this over to the other sections if you have access to the field service app. In our example today we did not have access to the field service app as we only utilized the sales and service sections, so we created a new entity and process directly within Customer Engagement.

Here are the steps we took:

Created a new entity called “Time Off Request”.

For the entity we made it available under sales and service as those are the two areas the employees used. This entity was set up to allow for notes, but does not require activities or document management. Queues are not used in our example, but as a process you could utilize time off queues versus an email notification directly to the manager.

Created custom fields and designed the form.

Here are the fields we created/updated:

  • Employee
    • This was set up as a look-up field and was pointed to users.
  • Department
    • Created as an option set with different team names. This allows us to track how many requests we have by team and manage staffing levels.
  • Start Date
    • Included both date and time so requests could be full days or just a few hours.
  • End Date
    • Set up the same way as the start date field.
  • Time Off Reason
    • Another option set where employees could choose PTO, Unpaid or Other time off reasons. If you have other reasons such as bereavement or jury duty those could be added to the list.
  • Status Reason
    • This field already exists but we did make a couple changes. Under the active section we changed active to requested. Under the inactive section we added two and renamed one so we have approved, denied and cancelled, with the default being approved.

Once we had all our fields created we designed the form. Here is what our form looks like:

Set up workflows.

We determined a couple different workflows were necessary to keep this process flowing smoothly.

  • Upon new time off request.
    • When a new time off request is saved the workflow gives the record a proper name based on the employee name and start date of request, then an email is sent to the manager alerting them to the time off request. The manager can access the record directly from the email. Here is our email set-up:

  • When the request is approved or declined.
    • A manager approves or declines our record by deactivating the record and then choosing the reason. Once the record is deactivated it triggers a workflow to send an email to the employee notifying them.

Updated/Created Views

We updated the default view to use our new custom fields to allow for easy filtering.

Here is what the active time off request view looked like:

A custom view was also created to show all approved and requested dates.

This view enables a manager to see all requests for their department so they don’t approve too many people off on the same day.

This process was fairly simple to set up but was very beneficial. This resulted in time savings and prevented negative morale issues due to problems or delays with time off requests.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant