AX 2012 Personal BI - By Example - Customer Aging I

I hope everyone is doing well, and having a great start to a brand new week. After taking a week off from blogging, I wanted to start back with a focus around a topic I've been spending a lot of time focusing on. This topic, is around getting the most value of of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. To be specific, this is around Business Intellegnce and fitting AX 2012 today, and tomorrow, into the BI Semantic Model.



As the name implies, I wanted to show off the power and flexibility of AX 2012 with use of PowerPivot. You have seen me post about this in the past, with how to correctly access AX data via PowerPivot and OData Feeds.



Now if you don't have PowerPivot installed, that is the first thing we need to get you connected with. When talking in terms of PowerPivot for this purpose of this series of post, we are speaking about 'PowerPivot for Excel 2010'. You can get this as a free download from the following location.: Microsoft BI: PowerPivot Download Page. Make sure to download and install the add-in, so that we can proceed.



Building from that knowledge, and keeping in-line with the BISM focus around Personal BI, lets dive into a great example, specifically for "Customer Aging". In this first part of this series, which I will finish out by the end of this week, lets focus on getting a Customer Aging Query that we can make use of. Therefore lets have a look at the "CustomerAging Query". For your reference, you can download this query, located here.: CustomerQging Query. Please keep in mind use at your own risk, and no warranty is implied. This came as part of the demo instance's for AX 2012.



You can at this point download and import this query, and add it to your document data sources, which is located under Organization Administration > Setup > Document Management > Document Data Sources.:



In doing this, we should be able to then launch Excel, open PowerPivot window, enter your OData Service, similar to the following.: "http://localhost:8101/DynamicsAx/Services/ODataQueryService/" In doing that, we should now see the CustomerAging Query to make use of. In clicking next you should see a screen similar to the following, after importing data.



Doing this, means we have added a new query to the AOT, added as a document data source, and consumed that document data source as an OData feed. Doing so means we correctly consume AX 2012 data, from the Application Layer. Moving forward from here, we will work with the Data, create computed columns, work with vertical & horizontal slicers and finally some conditional formatting. The last thing we will cover is publishing to SharePoint and displaying on a Role Center page.

That's all for this post, but check back tomorrow as we continue this focus on Personal BI for AX 2012. Till Then!
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