Dynamics AX OLAP Cube MSDN Walk throughs

With Dynamics AX 2009, some great boost came to the BI area of AX. I plan on covering BI from a higher level very soon, on how to select from all the options that exists, third party, base tools, office, etc.

Before I went into the higher level, I wanted to revisit three really good walk throughs on MSDN that anyone working with cubes in Dynamics AX 2009 will find very helpful.

The following are those three walk throughs.:

• Walkthrough: Creating a cube for Dynamics AX 2009


• Walkthrough: Defining KPI's for a Dynamics AX 2009 Cube


• Walkthrough: Analyzing Dynamics AX2009 Cube Data in Excel

I would recommend taking some time, and walking through the above, in the order given. With this we see the power, that exists right out of the box with creating perspective's, and using that to generate a BI project, and cube definition.

It's also worthy to note that in the first walk through, for creating a cube with Dynamics AX 2009, that the creation of the Master Company Reporting Currency Dimension is specifically laid out in exact order for enabling the display of KPIs for a cube in a Business Overview Web part in Enterprise Portal / Role Centers.

These walk throughs focus on the out of the box BI platform provided with Dynamics AX 2009, and can be used to create your own custom Cubes, KPI's, and report against the cubes from within Excel, as well as enabling your KPI's to be pushlished as Web Parts and placed as part of Role Center pages.

BI is a part of a Dynamics AX 2009 ERP deployment. It may be a later phase, but and more should be considered ar part of the early phases of a Dynamics AX 2009 deployment. With this in mind, it's important to understand the different aspects of what's offered out of the box with BI. That's why it's important to understand the above walkthroughs for understanding how one creates a cube for Dynamics AX 2009, for adding KPI's, and accessing that data.

I plan on referencing this post in future post, as I start to talk about BI solutions with Dynamics AX from a high level, with the goals to help decision makers in choosing what is BI for my company? What does it mean? And what is the best tools, suites, etc. to enable that for my Dynamics AX 2009 investment? How does this fit into the Vision Microsoft has for 'BI'?

That's all for now, but check back soon as more to come!

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