Entries for the 'Business Intelligence' Category

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is Microsoft's recently rebranded CRM Online platform. Microsoft combined many of the features of their CRM and ERP offerings and changed the licensing model by breaking down their functions into category-specific apps for purchase individually or as part of a bundle. I will explore all of the different applications in a series of blog posts, but today I will focus on the Dynamics 365 for Sales app.  Pipeline Management The Dynamics 365 for Sales app is a...

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One of the most common complaints regarding the capabilities of Power BI and other reporting platforms at large is the ability, or lack thereof, to easily roll up data by month. Power BI, by default, has some capability to do this in the form of date hierarchies.  When you select a DateTime field as a dimension in a Power BI visualization, Power BI utilizes date hierarchies by default. This rolls up the measures to the year level and then enables drill downs into each quarter, month,...

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Following our acceptance into the Power BI Red Carpet Program in 2016, DMC has now earned membership as a Microsoft Showcase Partner, a premium partner group for Power BI. By participating in this program, DMC receives access to training opportunities that are reserved exclusively for Microsoft Power BI Showcase Partners. Program Requirements To be eligible for the Partner program, companies must be a Microsoft Partner with the Data Analytics competency, which requires that multiple indivi...

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DMC routinely completes projects involving a variety of technologies including Bluetooth connected devices and web-based API’s. During a recent FedEx Day, where everyone in the company works on a project that interests them and that they think will improve DMC, we decided to combine a few of those technologies and create a system for tracking the locations of our many office dogs! Getting Started FedEx Day requires that a project is completed in the span of FedEx day. Depending on th...

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DMC recently upgraded our Silver Cloud Productivity competency to Microsoft Gold for Cloud Productivity! This certification recognizes DMC for its expertise and experience helping clients deploy Microsoft cloud and hybrid solutions. Hybrid solutions rely on a combination of cloud and existing investments in on-premises resources.  This Microsoft Gold level certification makes DMC eligible for exclusive training opportunities that further the implementat...

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DMC is hosting a Power BI, Azure, and Azure IoT event that includes a hands-on BI workshop and IoT demonstration on Tuesday, May 10th (8:30 a.m. –12:00 p.m. CDT) at DMC Chicago (2222 N. Elston Ave., Ste. 200). Participants will learn how to take advantage of these offerings to improve business operations. Event Overview This event is ideal for business, engineering and IT leaders. You will walk away with a practical understanding of how these technologies work and...

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DMC has joined Microsoft’s Power BI Red Carpet Partner Program. DMC was selected by Microsoft to join the program based on our demonstrated proficiency in developing and implementing Power BI solutions for our customers. This recognition of our expertise with Power BI comes right on the heels of our selection to join the Azure IoT Red Carpet Partner Program last month. By joining this network of Microsoft Partners, DMC will be identified as a specialized provider of Power BI solutions. ...

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DMC is proud to announce that it has achieved Microsoft’s Silver Partner Status for Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. This achievement recognizes DMC’s proven ability to help customers monitor, analyze and plan business performance based on actionable business insight. DMC’s BI service offerings are geared towards helping clients identify and define high-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), design visually appealing dashboards, and complete technical data integration.&n...

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Reporting is almost a universal requirement for new projects coming into DMC these days. As part of an HMI we developed for a customer we also installed SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on a Siemens PLC. This is used to generate reports for production batches run on that PLC. The customer desired these reports to be in PDF format, which after some investigation was easy to do with SSRS. A little background on SSRS... SSRS is a web application that generates nice graphical reports from SQL...

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Recently I worked on a project where I needed to import test data from a chemical process contained in text files into a MS SQL Server database. I was about to start a C# .NET project to do this task, but I thought there has to be a quicker and easier way to do this. That is how I stumbled upon SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS can do exactly what I needed. This tool is a component included in all versions of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (except Express and Workgroup) that can handle dat...

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In the past, DMC has used MS SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) on multiple projects as a web-based reporting engine. I personally liked using SSRS a lot because it allowed us to design quite complicated reports in very little time. At the same time, I wished it were possible to edit data viewed in the report, such as editing row comments. While it wasn’t possible to edit report data using the standard set of SSRS features, our team was able to find a way around this by creating a cust...

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