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What is Business performance analytics?

  • Article

Business performance analytics is a powerful solution that is designed to transform your organization's data into actionable insights. In today's rapidly evolving business environment, the ability to use data for informed decision-making is critical. Business performance analytics enables users to streamline operations, enhance performance, and drive better business outcomes.

Through its seamless integration with the Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, and Power BI platforms, Business performance analytics offers a scalable and unified solution for analyzing operational and financial data at an unprecedented level of clarity and efficiency.

Value of Business performance analytics

Business performance analytics delivers a comprehensive approach for maximizing the value of your business data. By consolidating critical performance metrics, automating reporting processes, and enabling custom analytics, Business performance analytics helps organizations optimize operations and make strategic decisions with ease.

Benefits

Here are some of the key benefits of Business performance analytics:

  • Data-driven decision-making – Business performance analytics transforms raw data into actionable insights, so that organizations can make faster, smarter decisions that drive business growth and efficiency.
  • Comprehensive visibility – By consolidating financial and operational data across departments, Business performance analytics provides a holistic view of business performance. Therefore, it helps businesses monitor progress and identify areas for improvement.
  • Security and compliance – Because it's built on Microsoft's trusted cloud infrastructure, Business performance analytics ensures that your data is protected through advanced security measures. Therefore, it helps you stay compliant with industry standards.
  • Flexibility for business growth – Because Business performance analytics is fully customizable and extensible, it adapts to the specific needs of your business and scales as you grow. Therefore, it supports long-term success.

Business performance analytics as an SaaS solution

By using Business performance analytics as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, Dynamics 365 customers can quickly and efficiently take advantage of advanced analytics. Business performance analytics improves decision-making and operational efficiency, and drives better outcomes. At the same time, it avoids the complexity of deep system integrations.

Key SaaS capabilities

  • Immediate deployment – Because Business performance analytics can be deployed instantly, businesses can start to analyze data and generate insights without long setup times. In this way, Business performance analytics facilitates faster decision-making and operational improvements.
  • Comprehensive reporting and dashboards – Through its built-in reporting and interactive dashboards, Business performance analytics provides access to a wide range of preconfigured reports that cover multiple business functions.
  • Near-real-time analytics – Future releases of Business performance analytics will offer frequent data refreshes to enable near-real-time data analysis and reporting. Therefore, businesses will be able to make timely decisions that are based on the most current information.
  • Predictive insights – Future releases will introduce predictive analytics capabilities that enable businesses to forecast trends, identify risks, and seize opportunities for improving performance.
  • User-friendly interface – Because of its intuitive design, Business performance analytics requires minimal training. Therefore, it fosters broader adoption and enables a data-driven culture across the organization.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Business performance analytics is available as part of the Dynamics 365 Finance license. Therefore, it provides advanced analytics without requiring significant investments in IT infrastructure.

Key SaaS use cases

  • Finance and accounting – Generate financial reports, create detailed budgets, and track regulatory compliance.
  • Supply chain – Optimize inventory levels, manage suppliers, and improve logistics operations.
  • Project operations – Track project milestones, budget adherence, and resource utilization.
  • Commerce – Analyze sales performance, customer purchase patterns, and the impact of promotional campaigns.

Business performance analytics as a DaaS solution with data warehousing

Business performance analytics can also be used as a data as a service (DaaS) solution. By using Business performance analytics in this way, organizations can integrate its data models with their existing data warehousing infrastructure in Microsoft Fabric. This approach not only maximizes the value of existing data solutions but also positions businesses for future enhancements.

Key DaaS capabilities

  • Unified and scalable data models – By adopting Business performance analytics data models, customers can build custom models on top of a unified framework. This capability ensures consistency and scalability across data sets.
  • Future-proofing with automatic upgrades – Business performance analytics data models integrate seamlessly with future Dynamics 365 updates. This integration reduces manual maintenance and ensures access to the latest features.
  • Consistency and standardization – Business performance analytics data models provide consistency and standardization across data sources. Therefore, they ensure high data quality and integrity.
  • Advanced analytics and AI – By customizing Business performance analytics data models, organizations can take advantage of advanced analytics and AI capabilities. In this way, they can deepen insights without having to develop them from scratch.
  • Enhanced data governance – Unified Business performance analytics data models support better data governance by providing standardized data definitions, relationships, and hierarchies. Therefore, they ensure consistency and quality across the organization.

Key DaaS use cases

  • Financial services – Seamlessly integrate Business performance analytics data models to comply with financial regulations and ensure up-to-date reporting.
  • Retail – Customize inventory and sales analytics, and benefit from new features in Dynamics 365, without having to do lots of extensive rework.

Included with Dynamics 365 Finance

Business performance analytics is an innovative reporting tool that is included as part of the Dynamics 365 Finance license. In addition to its comprehensive analytics capabilities, Business performance analytics uses shared Dataverse entitlements, including access to the data lake. Therefore, customers can seamlessly integrate and manage their data.

Data reporting capacity

Customers who use Business performance analytics are currently entitled to report on up to eight quarters of data. The volume of data is also constrained by the storage capacity of the A3 SKU for Power BI Embedded. Customers that can't fit their data within the constraints of the Power BI A3 SKU should consider waiting for a future release, where additional data reporting capacity will be available. That future release will expand the data limits, so that larger data sets can be reported and analyzed.

Data refresh frequency

Business performance analytics allows for two data refreshes per day, at 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM (Coordinated Universal Time). More frequent refreshes will be available in the future, to ensure that customers can work with the most up-to-date information to meet their reporting needs.