Solver cloud — out with the old, in with the new

As competition amongst businesses continues to increase, one area that is separating the winners from the losers in their respective industries is data. Businesses are waking up to the fact that native ERP reporting is not going to cut it. They’re also realizing that the ability to quickly budget, plan, and forecast is more crucial than ever. Not only that, they’re realizing that these efforts need to be centralized and shouldn’t be treated as two disparate processes.

For what seems like decades, business users have struggled with manual reporting and planning processes which almost always revolve around Excel. For reporting, data is dumped into Excel from various sources and then massaged together by individuals within the business. When the next month’s reports are needed, this process is repeated while the hours of time spent doing so take a toll. For budgeting, templates are created inside of Excel and are then sent to budget contributors so that they can fill out their assigned cells. The contributors then send them back to a budgeting manager who then has to aggregate all of the submissions into a budget or plan for the year. This annual budgeting process is consistently painful, so the thought of re-forecasting simply seems out of reach for most businesses.

What if I told you that it didn’t have to be this way?

At Rand Group, we’re proud to offer our clients access to a dedicated Data Sciences Team that specializes in all things reporting, budgeting/planning, and analytics. One of the first things our team did upon its inception was evaluating dozens of third-party solutions to meet the needs of our diverse client base. In the Dynamics space, one product that really stood out was Solver Cloud. Solver (formerly BI360) is a household name in the Dynamics space having made a living filling the reporting and budgeting void presented with Microsoft ERPs. One of the things that separated Solver from the rest of the pack was that it encompasses all of the functionality we look for when selecting a product to represent in our practice. It offers robust reporting, modern budgeting, and forecasting, and also addresses the ever-growing set of data sources that clients accumulate by offering data warehousing.

The next question that always comes up is how does Solver compare to Jet Reports. This is a valid question given that Jet Reports is the other “sheriff in town” for Microsoft Dynamics reporting. The most obvious difference between the two solutions is that Solver is completely cloud-based whereas Jet requires a server on the client-side. Aside from the cloud, the biggest difference between the two is that Solver is more of an FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) solution whereas Jet Reports is a traditional reporting and analytics solution. Simply put, Solver is built to handle complex budgeting and forecasting needs whereas Jet is much more limited in this regard. Jet did release a budgeting tool called Jet Budgets in response to Solvers competitive niche; however, the product has yet to mature beyond the initial release. The fact is that Solver has been in the budgeting space for far longer and is well beyond Jet from a feature and functionality perspective in that area.

On the flipside, Jet Analytics offers more robust functionality for data warehousing and specifically an extension beyond a data warehouse known as “data cubes.” Solver doesn’t offer cubes and stops its analytics approach at the data warehouse level. Another advantage for Jet is the automation in designing a data warehouse and cubes. Jet comes with an incredibly powerful automated ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tool.

Rand Group’s Data Sciences team can help you implement the reporting and analytics tools that are the right fit for your organization. Contact our analytics experts today to find out how we can help advance your data strategy.