K3 simplifies Business Intelligence
5th June 2007, Birmingham – K3, the UK's largest provider of Microsoft Dynamics business solutions, will be demonstrating its new Business Intelligence tools at Retail Solutions.
K3’s Business Intelligence tools focus on usability, making it easy for information workers and decision makers throughout the organisation to reach the information they need to make effective and timely decisions. To accelerate the implementation process, and make sure customers see a rapid return on their BI investment, K3 offer a number of modules that simplify data extraction and dedicated reporting packs including loss-prevention and sales analysis. Customers can combine these packs to build their own rapid implementation BI package.
Organisations have often found providing accurate data to every level of the business hierarchy a challenge. K3's Business Intelligence tools and techniques enable businesses to deliver accurate, relevant management information to decision makers. Traditionally businesses have struggled to delivery accurate, timely information to their support teams, either through IT department bottlenecks – insufficient personnel to design, modify or generate reports, simultaneous data input and output stretching available IT facilities, slow report processing times or masses of indistinguishable data contained in bulky reports.
To overcome these problems, information works have resorted to other methods such as spreadsheets to create reports, but this has led to other problems such as time-consuming manual data manipulation, departmental reports that conflict with each other or human error that results in inaccurate information.
Business Intelligence tackles the data delivery challenge, BI software platforms and applications process data quickly and accurately, use objective evaluation to highlight exceptions and trends and present information in user-friendly, focused report dashboards and business alerts.
K3 uses Microsoft SQL Server’s powerful database management, data integration, reporting and analysis tools to build an advanced, reliable BI platform.
Data is extracted during quieter periods from transactional databases and other data sources, transformed into meaningful management information and loaded into a data warehouse which is designed specifically to optimise data output.
Benefits accrue immediately from this operation:
- Gathering the data into a single database eliminates conflicting data – everybody in the business now refers to a single data source.
- The data warehouse (typically on a separate server) is now used for data reporting and analysis, eliminating peak-time output demands on the transactional database.
Multi-dimensional (or OLAP) databases further enhance the data stored in the data warehouse. Measures (for example, sales value, quantity sold) and Dimensions (such as product, week, region) with user-friendly names are combined in a cube and totals are pre-aggregated.
Pre-aggregated data overcomes the problem of long report-processing times. Responses to user requests for data are generally immediate and users quickly become more productive and efficient.
K3 BI package for Dynamics.NAV
To accelerate the deployment of a Dynamics.NAV BI solution, K3 has designed standard BI modules for:
- Sales analysis
- Inventory analysis
- Warehouse performance
- Purchasing and supplier performance
- Fraud analysis
- CRM
About K3
As the UK’s largest provider of Microsoft Dynamics, K3 provides business software solutions for the retail sector, built around the complete Microsoft technology stack.
As a Gold Level Partner, and with 25 years of experience, K3’s implementations employ a structured approach that focuses on delivering unique competitive advantages within an agreed performance structure.
Clients that have enjoyed the benefits of a K3 software solution include:
Adidas, Alliance Pharmacy, American Golf, Booths Supermarkets, Carpetright, Choices UK Plc, Dobbies Garden Centres, Dreams, Gamestation, Gamestop, Lakeland, Leekes, National Gallery Company, Pearsons, Rugby Football Union, Shoon, Space NK.
K3 is part of the K3 Business Technology Group Plc