Dynamics 365 F&O/AX Dynamics 365 CE / CRM Dynamics GP Business Central / NAV UG Dynamics SL Power Platform Fabric UG MS Copilot UG

[Lewis Rosenberg]

?For those of you using Jet Reports Professional or Enterprise, did you roll it out to any non-technical users (ie. Sales, Marketing, Finance, etc.)

If you did, are those people designing their own reports? How did you get their buy-in and how did you get them trained?

#BIandReporting

——————————
Lewis Rosenberg
IT Manager
Mars Fishcare
Chalfont PA

NAVUG Board of Advisors, Programming
NAVUG Programming Committee
NAVUG Membership Committee
——————————
????

[Andrea Riviezzo]

Hi – I’m probably one of those basic non-IT people and use JET. We have Enterprise, and use it for our marketing, sales, product managers, customer service, etc. Of course, we also use it for us Finance/Accounting types.
For the most part our non-accounting depts use the cubes to extra data they need. We showed them the cubes, and worked a lot there – none of them have designer licenses. I wouldn’t say adoption was amazing, there’s some who use it but most complain on the road it’s hard and most I guess a pivot table eludes them.  CS and Ops more took to it b/c they can see what they need and it was more someone built and they can just refresh which is pretty simple. 
We then have myself and the Ops Manager get trained on JET reports. While I’m sure we’re scratching the surface of JETs capabilities, and there is some complexity, we can get what we need rather easily.  Ops Manager took a JET in-person boot camp, and myself on the job mixed with JET’s website. For Finance we mostly use refresh-able reports, BS, IS, etc where we can just enter the new month, new budget, year, dept etc.

——————————
Andrea Riviezzo
Inovonics
Louisville CO
——————————
——————————————-

[Bill Kilrain]

?Our experience is similar to Andrea’s.  We mainly use cubes in preparing sales and marketing reports.  Our previous process involved dumping tons of data from NAV, doing some manipulation, creating a pivot table, then emailing a “dead” version of the pivot table to many users.  So while the transition was far from painless, on the whole it is a huge improvement.  Users do not have design permissions, but you can do a lot in a cube report without being a designer.  That is both a good and a bad thing.  What I have told users is that if you are doing more than basic setting of slicers and timelines, you probably need the report modified or you need a different report.

Users also tend to want super-detailed reports (in my opinion – too detailed) , then complain about how slow the reports run.  There were 3 of us that went through the design training, we trained the users.  We also chose to use the web portal to access the reports.  I know the reports are being used, because if there is a problem, I get lots of emails.

For the sales management team, buy-in was easy.  They loved that they have near real time access to sales data.  I anticipate that operations (which we have not done much with yet) will be tougher.

——————————
Bill Kilrain
Director Planning and Budgeting
Sign-Zone Inc.
Brooklyn Center MN
——————————
——————————————-

[Mathew Ealy]

For Jet professional we rolled that out to our accounting teams both AP & AR, the C level administrative assistants also received training and where part of that roll out. For Jet enterprise  all managers, sales people, & buyers had and used Jet extensively.

All those group write their own reports, IT was only used in the very beginning. We had Jet do the training, and purchased training hours along with the recordings of the training for refreshers and on boarding. We where able to get buy in because of the long lead time IT needed to write reports and the amount of information they would need up front to write the reports. It didn’t allow the company to be nimble enough to react to short window opportunities and didn’t allow our sales people enough time to procrastinate their preparations. By giving them Jet it allowed them to take advantage of these things and leverage the knowledge quicker. 

——————————
Mathew Ealy
Nav Support Specialist
Rentokil N. America
Reading PA
——————————
——————————————-

[Val Gameiro]

We rolled out to Accounting folks that are proficient in Excel, but not super users, and yes, some are writing some reports after I sat with them a couple times. They love it!

——————————
Val Gameiro
Senior NAV Analyst
BPL Plasma
Austin, Texas
——————————
——————————————-

[Meenakshi Singh]

Hi Lewis,

I did roll out the Jet professional to my Finance staff. They are obviously pretty good with Excel… I still do some heavy lifting regarding designing the reports but they are pretty savvy with simple reports.

I did have them attend a training class – online, just to get them to understand the basics of designing a report. However, I still guide in understanding the table structure and linking between two tables.

But after designing a couple of similar reports, they got a good handle on it & a couple of them are pretty good actually. Even for complex reports, they usually have a pretty good idea as to what needs to be done. I think it is beneficial to get them to understand it, even if they don’t design reports son daily basis. Definitely saves me the trouble of figuring out what they are trying to achieve sometimes.

Thanks,
Meenakshi

——————————
Meenakshi Singh
Manager of Business Applications
Home Market Foods, Inc.
Norwood MA
——————————
——————————————-