Planning with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Plans, budgets, and forecasts built collaboratively across the enterprise were historically elusive for companies with various technologies and software assembled over years, if not decades. Business systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) don’t talk to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) or Human Capital Management (HCM) which don’t talk to FP&A software, or tax software, or procurement systems.

Over the past two decades, Microsoft attempted to solve this for global organizations by building upon their Office suite dominance to offer compelling finance and operations solutions assembled around Excel, PowerBI, and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP. However, planning, budgeting, and forecasting remained siloed and often dependent on manual consolidation of disconnected Excel worksheets to accomplish a yearly or quarterly planning process.

This gap in a fully integrated Microsoft finance and operations technology stack is now in the process of closing. Jedox’s partnership with Microsoft means that together, the two organizations can offer collaborative planning and performance at scale that fits neatly within the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. We’re proud that the investments Jedox made in honing technical connections to Microsoft, means it is the most logical FP&A software platform for companies already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem or who are planning to migrate to a Microsoft environment.

How Jedox EPM builds upon a Microsoft Dynamics Finance and Operations data foundation

The foundation of your business is data.

The seamless flow of data between business systems and people means your organization can act more decisively when new opportunities emerge. Iterative scenario planning, augmented by advanced forecasting technologies like Jedox AIssisted™ Planning, or simply fed by internal drivers derived from your business systems, is predicated on accurate, always up-to-date data.

How many business systems are you connecting? And, what are the methods of sharing data between systems today? Answers to these questions are critical factors in whether you can generate meaningful insight from your data.

Jedox makes secure, effective connections to the Microsoft Dataverse.

Jedox extracts valuable financial and operational data tables through a secure connection to Dynamics via Microsoft Dataverse. Dataverse standardizes and simplifies tables and relationships within the underlying data model and offers a clean layer to access this data. This allows Jedox model developers to build standard models that are common and consistent across all Dynamics users within an organization.

OData is the secure connection protocol based on the RESTful API framework which provides the ability to maintain a single source of financial and operational data between Microsoft and Jedox systems. If this doesn’t mean much to you, that’s okay. At its core, Jedox connected to the Microsoft Dataverse means you will be able to collaborate between teams and generate meaningful insight from your data.

Real-world use case: A global textile company improved strategic operational planning

• Leveraged historical sales and operational transactions and operational data housed within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance to feed forward-looking planning scenarios
• Used Jedox AIssisted™ Planning predictive models applied to historical time-series data to understand retail demand
• Married top-down and bottom-up analysis by engaging stakeholders across 30 companies to contribute to ongoing planning processes.

How Jedox encourages collaboration in planning through Excel worksheets

Companies that crowdsource information throughout an organization make 30% better decisions. Jedox creates the planning layer within the Microsoft ecosystem, and those plans, budgets and forecasts must incorporate feedback and data from people across the organization. Lowering the barriers to contributing to planning is paramount for effective planning.

The Jedox Online Add-in provides you and the rest of your company’s planners with access to the Jedox platform from within a familiar Excel application (Windows, Mac, or Browser). You can modify, plan, or budget your data with writeback capabilities and access updated information at any time. Maybe most importantly, the add-in allows contributors to your planning process to send data through the familiar Excel interface lessening the risk for bad data entering your models.

Real-world use case: Gradiant created Excel-based, localized, planning templates

• Used the Jedox Excel Add-in to collect planning data from colleagues in seven countries.
• Eliminated version control problems caused by disconnected Excel files and siloed financial and operational data in various business systems.
• Lowered training costs for their workforce by working in a familiar Excel-based environment and not needing to learn a new tool or user-interface.

How Jedox feeds insight data to PowerBI so companies can act decisively

While Jedox provides comprehensive visualization, dashboarding, and reporting capabilities, many organizations live in PowerBI for their business intelligence needs. Through a turnkey connector, Jedox automatically keeps the PowerBI environment up to date with planning, budgeting, and forecasting data. In fact, people who use Microsoft’s business intelligence offering can also writeback updates to Jedox through PowerBI if need be.

Make fewer technical connections to lower operational and collaborative planning adoption risk

Ultimately, whether it makes it easier for business users across the enterprise to collaborate in planning and forecasting activities because they can operate with a familiar Excel environment, or you increase IT resource capacity by maintaining automatic data-synchronization with Jedox, Dynamics 365 Finance and PowerBI, Jedox takes the approach of “playing nicely” with the Microsoft ecosystem. Ultimately, the combination of Jedox and Microsoft means organizations can optimize their technology investments by purchasing complementary, not redundant or overlapping, software systems.

From the first remote data collection of planning data via Excel, to generating management reports, to everything in-between, Jedox and Microsoft will power your business for decades to come.