Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions

Microsoft was founded in 1975. The company’s product segments provide management with a financial view of its key businesses. The segments provide a framework for the alignment of strategies and objectives across the development, sales, marketing, and services organizations, and for the timely and rational allocation of development, sales, marketing, and services resources within businesses. The company’s seven product segments are: Client; Server and Tools; Information Worker; Microsoft Business Solutions; MSN; Mobile and Embedded Devices; and Home and Entertainment.

The company’s research and development facilities are located primarily in Redmond, Washington, with smaller facilities in such locations as Mountain View, California; Fargo, North Dakota; Beijing, China; Dublin. As of June 30, 2005, Microsoft employed approximately 61,000 people.

Like its size, Microsoft’s ambitions are anything but small. The world’s #1 software company provides a variety of products and services, including its Windows operating systems and Office software suite. The company has expanded into markets such as video game consoles, servers and storage software, and digital music players.

Microsoft’s success includes the flexibility to respond to emerging markets, such as today’s growth opportunities in China and Eastern Europe, and to the ever-changing needs of the customers. Capitalizing on these opportunities and demands involves quickly adapting to new approaches, trading partners, and procurement strategies.

In response to these global challenges, Microsoft offers Microsoft Dynamics, a suite of integrated, adaptable business applications for small and medium-sized organizations and divisions of large enterprises. These integrated solutions—delivered through a worldwide network of experienced Microsoft Certified Partners—work like and with familiar Microsoft software and help automate and improve financial, customer relationship, business intelligence/analytics, and supply chain management.

Microsoft Key Strengths

• Microsoft’s Dynamics GP Business Intelligence solution product lets you plan more effectively. With Dynamics GP, you get the power to create accurate, high-level plans instantly by automatically spreading increases and decreases across each of your planning periods, using up-to-date data pulled directly from the General Ledger in Microsoft Dynamics GP. What’s more, integration across Microsoft FRx and Microsoft Forecaster enables you to drill down smoothly from summaries to transactions.
• Decision makers who want to perform ad hoc queries on Microsoft Dynamics GP data without logging into the system can now work with Office Excel report templates, which are based on the data that can be found in more than 200 SmartList favorites. Business intelligence reports can be stored on Office SharePoint Server 2007 or another shared network location for easy access and instantly refreshed at any time to ensure data is current.
• With Office Excel 2007 Services, a component of Office SharePoint Server 2007, all your Excel-based reports, spreadsheets, and pivot tables can be stored in a centralized, Web-based location—helping ensure that people are using and sharing a real-time view of data and performance intelligence.
• Analysis Cubes in Microsoft Dynamics GP enables people to take full advantage of SQL Server Analysis Services by providing out-of-the-box preconfigured OLAP cubes. Analysis Cubes provides virtually unlimited ways to look at data with powerful interactive analysis.
• SmartList in Microsoft Dynamics GP enables people to organize and present data from the accounting system in a way that makes sense to them. They can display lists of records from a specific category, such as Customers or Purchase Orders, as well as apply search criteria to limit results to only the records of interest. They can even determine which columns should be displayed, as well as the order of the columns.
• With the bottom-line BI benefits from Microsoft Dynamics GP, you empower your decision-makers by giving them access to information across the organization. Integration between industry-leading tools and Microsoft Dynamics GP, such as Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, and Microsoft FRx Professional, gives your people the information they need to forecast and make business decisions. People can also drill down to the information they need and analyze data in multiple ways.