Navision Sales Analyzer Dashboard

Navision Sales Analyzer is a Business Intelligence Dashboard for sales which built on the powerful Tableau data visualization platform. Developed by Singapore based Knowledge Management Solutions, it empowers Microsoft Navision users to analyze and visualize data and to make strategic calls about sales and marketing.

• Plan revenue
• Analyze the impact of promotions
• Discover performance of products
• Compare product market share Vs. market growth
• Perform market basket analysis
• See customer buying behaviour clearly

You can watch a video introduction of Navision sales analyzer below. If you would like to find out more, KMS has a free demo event to introduce the product to the market. Click here to join : KMS Navision Sales Analyzer Demo.

What is Tableau Drive?

With skyrocketing revenues and number of 100K USD deals (a gauge showing enterprise adaptation of a business software), Tableau is getting fast into enterprise-wide BI deployment. As the emphasis on "Tableau for Enterprise" was significantly higher in this years Tableau Customer Conference (September 2014), Tableau Software has also released Tableau Drive, a  methodology for scaling out self-service analytics.

So what is Tableau Drive? This is a freely available methodology relying on iterative, agile methods that are faster and more effective than traditional long-cycle deployment. A cornerstone of this approach is a new model of a partnership between business and IT. In Drive methodology, IT owns the “Center of Operations” and business owns analytics and the “Center of Evangelism”.

Tableau Software released the methodology ahead of Tableau 9.0 which is expected in the first quarter of 2015. Tableau 9.0 is expected to have a lot of improvements in scalability some of which were showcased in September's event.

Drive has 4 phases "Discovery", "Prototyping", "Foundation Building" and "Scaling Out".

The 4 phases of Tableau Drive

Tableau ready for Enterprise BI

Tableau, one of the most popular BI tools in the market today, is truly an amazing and comprehensive platform. Yet, many still think that Tableau just an eye candy toy tool, good for making pretty pictures but not for a serious, enterprise BI level platform. This is absolutely not true (if this was true, Tableau would not be in the leaders quadrant of Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2014).

Tableau offers tremendous efficiency, productivity, flexibility, performance and cost savings. Some discovers this accidentally, they bring Tableau in the project as their personal tool to understand data and then Tableau's highly viral nature carries it into the hearth of enterprise BI. Some innovative project teams head starts enterprise BI with Tableau and usually awarded successful implementations ("usually" because some teams will always have the ability to screw up projects even with great tools). You can see this in numbers. In Q2 2014, there were 157 $100,000-plus deals (a usual KPI to measure enterprise success of BI tools) and the number is increasing fast.

And yet the best part of the story is that Tableau Software, the company developing Tableau, is working hard to make it more enterprise ready in every release.

Tableau 9.0, the upcoming major version release, will most probably carry the product to a much higher level. September 2014's Tableau Customer Conference was the most important indicator of this ground breaking shift : "Tableau for Enterprise BI" was more emphasized compared to previous years. In an interview with InformationWeek, Tableau's VP product management Daniel Jewett, said that they have had a roadmap for how to bring 'analytics at scale' for five years. In the conference of September, Tableau Software also announced a massive update of its data engine that will bring support of parallel queries on machines with multicore processors, resulting in a 4x speed increase, company executives said.

Another gesture of focus for wide-scale enterprise deployments was the introduction of Tableau Drive, an implementation methodology and a set of services. Based on iterative, agile methods that are faster and more effective than traditional long-cycle deployments, Tableau Drive, is freely available.

Tableau is also commercially more effective compared to many competitors out there. Although Tableau server license pricing is not public, I would say it scales up very well without going into "Oh-my-Gosh" region in terms of Dollars.