In this blueprint we will work through one example and show you how you can develop your own workflow process for product approvals that allow you to submit, track and approve the product review process.

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Built into Dynamics AX is a feature for managing the setup of new Vendors which allows users to request for new vendors to be added, for the purchasing group approval process by the way of workflows, and finally automatically create new vendor records.  Additionally, if you are using the Vendor Portal, the on-boarding process will allow you to co-ordinate the setup of the vendor users, and if you want to, you van also have the prospective vendors update and approve their information before they are approved to ensure that their details are correct, and that they want to do business with you as well.  This process is a great way to streamline the vendor setup process and is also a time saver because people are involved through the workflow process and all activities are tracked.

In this blueprint we will show how the vendor on-boarding process is handled through the Vendor Requests function within Dynamics AX.

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The Export to Excel button may not seem like the most impressive feature of Dynamics AX, but don’t be fooled. If you look closely, you will notice that the when the data is exported to Excel, the data is still linked to Dynamics AX through the Excel Add-In, which means that once it is in your workbook, you can refresh it at any time without having to re-export. Also, if you want to add additional fields after the export from AX, then you can do that directly from Excel. This means that you can export data from any screen within Dynamics AX and then create reports and analysis within Excel that you can use over and over again without any additional work.

In this walkthrough we will show how you can use the Export to Excel function within Dynamics AX to create live worksheets in Excel. Read More

Everyone has used Pivot Tables within Excel at one point in time to create simple reports against Dynamics AX, and some of you may have also used Power Pivot to create more elaborate dashboards and charts.  Recently Microsoft extended out the query and reporting capabilities within Excel with the Power BI suite.  In addition to extending the Power Pivot capabilities, they also added three more tools called Power Query, Power View & Power Map, and that means that you have a whole new set of reporting options.

In this presentation we will show you how you can use all of the Power BI tools to analyze your Dynamics AX data.

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Perhaps you have heard about the new tool in Excel called PowerPivot, but wonder how it can enhance your use of Excel.

In this series we will show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable.

Here are all of the blog posts that are included in this series:

1. Using Pivot Tables to Analyze Dynamics AX Data
2. Using PowerPivot to Create Dynamics AX Dashboards
3. Adding Timeline Slicers to PowerPivot Dashboards
4. Creating Additional Calculated Columns into PowerPivots
5. Applying Filters to a PowerPivot Data Model
6. Creating Joins between Multiple PowerPivot Datasets
7. Using Functions to Create Calculated Columns in PowerPivots
8. Creating URL and Picture Columns in PowerPivots

PowerPivot is a great tool that gives you a lot more capabilities that the normal Pivot function lacks, and in this worked example we have shown how it also extends out to SharePoint giving you a number of new publishing and visualization options.

Once you have mastered all of the basics of PowerPivot, you may want to dive into some other features like:

• The creation of more complex calculations using the DAX Queries
• The creation of KPI’s based off the calculations
• Reporting hierarchies

Then you will want to start investigating the other tools that are included in the PowerBI suite (which PowerPivot is just one of). The other tools are:

• PowerView
• PowerMap
• PowerQuery

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With the R2 release of Dynamics AX 2012, a new feature was quietly snuck into the product that allows you to store document attachments from Dynamics AX within SharePoint rather than within an archive location, or within the database. This opens up a whole slew of possibilities when it comes to document management within SharePoint.

In this example we will show how you can create a document management structure within SharePoint that you can use in conjunction with the Dynamics AX attachments feature, and also we will show a few tweaks that you can make that may make managing your documents within SharePoint just a little easier. Read More

PowerView is a great tool for creating dashboards and analytics for Dynamics AX, and you can easily embed it into Role Centers to create summary dashboards, and you can use it to drill into offending statistics that you notice, and you can easily create new dashboards using the new Analyze button in Dynamics AX 2012 R2. But what would be even better would be having context sensitive dashboards built into the actual master data forms. Then you would be able to see statistics and trends against the data that you a focused on. Fortunately that is not very hard to do.

In this worked example we will show how you can easily create a new dashboard through PowerView and then embed it within the Dynamics AX forms to show you just the statistics that you are looking for. Read More

The Excel Add-In is an incredibly useful tool because it doesn’t just allow you to download information from Dynamics AX, but it also allows you to publish information back to the system without compromising the data integrity. You can use this for the initial data setup within Dynamics AX, quick maintenance of multiple records, moving data from one system to another, and even aggregating data through matrix fields. And best of all, this tool is included for free with Dynamics AX, so you don’t need to buy additional licenses in order to use it.

In this worked example we will show how you can use the Dynamics AX Excel Add-In to make updating data a breeze. Read More

Dynamics has a lot of little Easter Eggs of functionality built into it, and one of them that I just discovered is the ability to have the system automatically update all of your currency exchange rates through the rate authorities’ web services. There is no need to update these manually ever again.

In this worked example we will show how you can quickly configure the automatic updating of the exchange rates, and then never worry about them again. Read More