Visibility into business information is critical to achieve business goals. Insight into the key processes that affect your business provides the foundation for informed decisions and overall business success.
Traditionally, the IT staff writes reports and extracts data for the team to support decision making. With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 CU7, users are provided pre-configured Human Resources and Payroll OLAP cubes, which let users extract exactly the data that they need.
In this blog we will show how to use Power View for ad hoc analysis. We will do this by walking through the steps of analyzing the number of workers hired by year, but then also showing the ethnic breakdown of those hires. We will also create charts (easily!) and then further slice the data to see which of those hires had military service.
The cubes can be accessed from various points in the product. For example, the HR cube can be accessed from the Workers list page by selecting the ‘Analyze data’ button from the action bar. You can access the PR cube in a similar manner by selecting the Payroll tab in the Workers list page, and selecting the ‘Analyze data’ button from the action bar.
Once in Power View, there will be a field list on the right hand side of the screen. There you can select your measures, and your dimensions. If you are unfamiliar with cubes, think of a measure as a column of data in a table or view that contains quantifiable data, such revenue, profit, number of items sold, or number of workers. A dimension is then used to filter that data.
Before working with a measure you can filter your data to a specific company, or you can add this filter at a later time. In this example, we want to filter our data by the USMF company. (Choose the Company dimension attribute and drag into the Filters area.)
Once we have selected the company, we want to understand how many workers were hired by USMF each year, as well as the ethnic breakdown of those hires. In order to measure this, we must first understand how many workers we have in each of these areas. Therefore, we will select the Number of workers measure, as shown below.
Once we have the number of workers listed, we will want to add the dimensions for Employment Start Date and Ethnic Origin. In the field list, we will need to expand the Employment start date dimension, and then scroll down and select the Year attribute. The year of employment appears in the data area.
Next we want to add data for the ethnic origin. This is very similar to the steps that we had taken before.
We will select the Ethnic Origin dimension attribute (located within the worker details dimension). Notice the ethnic origin now appears in the data area.
Furthermore, we can filter the data to a specific year. To do this we would select the Employment start date dimension attribute again, but this time will drag it into the Filters/View area. In the Filters area, expand the Year dimension and select the following years:
Calendar year 2009
Calendar year 2010
Calendar year 2011
Calendar year 2012
This will filter both sets of data.
It’s also very easy to create a chart for your data. Simply select the group of data (number of employees by year or by ethnic breakdown) and then navigate to Action pane -->Design Tab and select the chart of your choice. In our example we selected a column chart for the number of workers by year, and a pie chart for the worker by ethnic origin.
One of the biggest advantages of cubes is the ability to see the relationships between data. In our example below we selected Hispanic/Latino ethnic group in the Ethnic origin pie chart. Both graphs are now updated so that they show only the slice of data that represents that group.
Furthermore, you can slice the data to see additional relationships. In our example we chose to slice this data further to see how many of these workers have military service. You can see in the example below, that 1 worker hired in 2012 had military service, while 4 workers in 2009 had military service. Furthermore, you can see the ethnic origin of this subset of workers.
Also, the Power View charts can be saved and added to your role center for easy viewing!
Coming soon will be a blog post on how to connect to a data cube using Microsoft Excel.
In the meantime, if you are looking for additional information on cubes, please refer to the following links:
HR
http://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn530765.aspx
Payroll
http://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn530764.aspx
Shiela