Leading services firm enables effective data analysis and educated business decisions

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1 Headquarters: US Industries: Accounting, Technology, and Advisory Services Solution technology: Power BI Azure Dynamics CRM 1998 Leading services firm enables effective data analysis and educated business decisions Many companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), lack the resources to accurately and efficiently analyze their data. Sikich, a dedicated Microsoft partner, has been able to leverage the Microsoft Power BI interactive data visualization tools to provide customers a means to analyze data effectively, make intelligent business decisions, and optimize operations. This solution has allowed us to broaden our target market and reach out to SMBs. Situation - Ruby Baweja, Senior Managing Consultant at Sikich Reporting challenges By nature, many SMBs store their data in repositories that do not communicate amongst each other. They end up gathering data in Excel spreadsheets to analyze the information and create reports for the executives. Without a good representation of their information, poor decisions may be made and revenue opportunities could be overlooked. Armada Dynamics, a rental business solutions company based on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform, faced similar challenges. Only select employees had access to the information, so obtaining the data and building reports from it became a challenge, making the process frustrating, time consuming, and inconsistent. As a result, the reports inaccurately represented the company s financial status, disabling them from making timely and informed business decisions, and consequently, missing out on revenue opportunities. They needed a BI tool with the capability to centralize their data, provide better access, and gaining a better understanding of key business information such as sales and forecasting.

2 2016 Business needs Armada Dynamics needed an affordable way to quickly create reports that accurately and clearly represent their data. However, they found that many business intelligence (BI) technologies available in the market were more appropriate for larger enterprises due to cost and complexity. They turned to Sikich, a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) for help. Breakthrough solution With their BI solution running on Power BI, Sikich offers their customers customized solution templates designed to fit their unique industry. They began building solution templates that leverage Power BI for the data stored in clients ERP systems and package them as a managed services offering through the CSP program. Through these templates, they are able to extract data from their SQL Server database and replicate the data to create standardized dashboards that can be customized, if needed. Ruby Baweja, Senior Managing Consultant at Sikich, explains: Instead of starting from scratch, customers can leverage this BI tool immediately by connecting their database to the solution templates views. This solution has allowed us to broaden our target market and reach out to SMBs. For just $9.99 a month, customers can view updated, customized reports at their convenience anytime and anywhere. Users can define access control and assign permissions within Power BI. Operations have also become smoother with Sikich s Power BI mobile solution the users are able to log in and see their most critical information, enabling them to make faster, smarter decisions. This, as a result, allows them to focus on their job and increase productivity. After adopting Sikich s Power BI visualization solution, Armada Dynamics is better able to analyze their financial trends and has become a competitive player in the rental business solution industry. With the Power BI solution, we can not only monitor the business metrics in real-time to prevent losses, but we can also identify new business opportunities, which gives us a competitive edge. - Moses de los Santos, Managing Director at Armada Dynamics

3 Company profile: As a Microsoft partner, Sikich is a leading accounting, technology, and advisory services firm with more than 750 employees in 14 offices. They rank as one of the country s top 35 largest CPA firms and among the top 1% of all enterprise resource planning solution partners in the world providing the personalized attention their customers need to grow and experience success. Key results: Effective decision-making Greater agility Enhanced efficiency Ability to pinpoint issues These demo screenshots include hypothetical data for illustration In a demo example, regional managers can log into the Power BI dashboard and determine to what effect the pipeline, product quality, and industry trends have on sales. As they go to the Power BI Sales Report to compare year-over-year sales for specific customers, they are able to see that sales fell off by 90 percent for a specific customer. They can tell that the customer is in an industry dealing with new regulations. Thus, the slow sales, however unfortunate, are expected in the first quarter. With this information, the organization can make the appropriate adjustments to get their sales back on target, knowing all data is consistent across the whole organization. Benefits and impact Power BI helped shorten the Sikich sales cycle significantly. They are now able to provide customers with demos that show the Power BI visualization dashboards using their own data. They are also making an impact on their customers business, including Armada Dynamics. As de los Santos

4 t summarizes, Sikich s Power BI solution empowers all of our employees to have the business KPIs at their fingertips at any time, from anywhere. Customer benefits Reduced deployment time Installing the Power BI dashboard is simple. The process of building a custom solution takes approximately three to six weeks, and even less time for customers to begin visualizing their data. Customized reports Customers can customize their solution templates to create reports with any set of data and analyze that data in any way they need. User experience Customers are able to get reports on time, tailored to their specific needs. The mobile option also enables customers to check reports and respond to issues remotely. Partner benefits End-to-end customer support through a single platform The CSP program helps Sikich resell their offering and combine it with other Microsoft Azure products available on the platform. They can have a single platform to manage all of the customers Azure consumption, including billing and monitoring. Power BI also makes it easier to cross-sell with other Microsoft solutions, such as Azure. Baweja concludes, The CSP platform allows us to provide end-to-end support for our customers and stay with them throughout the whole journey. Roadmap Beyond using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce for data and analytics, Sikich is working with Microsoft on Microsoft Dynamics GP and NAV templates for Power BI. An additional service that Sikich is offering to attract new customers is a Dashboard-in-a-Day Training Workshop on how to extract information from the data source, and how to build and share visualizations. Explore Sikich s Projects

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