Something I find many folks don’t know, at least on one level or another: most of today’s business intelligence (BI) solutions have been designed and built with integration into Microsoft Office in mind. Arguably, Excel is the main medium to which most BI information is exported (or in some cases, it can be the BI tool unto itself), so it’s logical that these integrations are essential to any strategic BI platform. Really, no longer is a full integration with Microsoft Office a differentiator – it should be required functionality.

However, even though MS Office integration is now fairly prevalent in most of the main BI solutions, this technology still tends not to be taken advantage of in the ways it was intended. There is much unrealized potential related to this integration and most of it is the result of a lack of training or education.

MS Office integration is bisynchronous, meaning you can initiate BI from the appropriate Office product or you can export from a dedicated BI tool to an Office product. In too many cases (and this truly saddens the hardcore BI wonk in me), the two-way integration for end users simply means there is a nice little button in their Office task bar that they can click to get access to the BI solution and run a report.  Put another way, instead of starting in BI and exporting to Excel, the user starts in Office and accesses BI via a basic GUI integration. In this scenario there really isn’t much difference between the two and the advantages of this integration are essentially lost; it’s good for marketing feature bullet lists and not much else.

But there’s so much more to be had.  Let’s take a moment and explore a basic example that would harness more depth of this type of integration.

Let’s say you have to generate monthly presentations for your management team and you use the same PowerPoint template every month. However, each month your data changes and you have to update the numbers within your PPT.  This means you have to run your reports, manipulate them and get the data you need, each and every month.   You then must manually update the PPT with the new monthly data.

Depending on how extensive the reports are and how many slides you have and how much manipulation you have to conduct, this could take a significant number of hours to accomplish – all for something that’s pretty rote and programmatic.  Not only that, but while you’re doing such a task, you just know that this sort of work is exactly what integration and automation were designed to handle.

Well, what if your PPT were automatically integrated with your relevant BI reports that could, in turn, instantly populate the month’s data for your PPT? In this scenario, since only the data changes (not the content or format), you could simply use the integration with MS Office and automatically refresh the BI reports, saving you significant hours of time in preparing your presentation. Additionally, since this avoids the “manual” part of updating, you reduce the potential to introduce errors. The presentation stays the same, you refresh your important reports from your BI tool and the integration with Office does the rest.  Easy.

Is this the most powerful feature on Earth?  Not even close.  But it is often overlooked and downright underutilized.  Typically, once I show clients how they can trim a considerable chunk of time from their workflow with this integration, they wonder how they ever lived without it.

As with many things in enterprise technology, the gods live in the details.  From simplicity comes power.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

• Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering: Digging Deeper
• Why Excel Is Not an Enterprise BI Solution
• Art Meets Science: Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering
• Living Together: Oracle BI and PeopleSoft
• Back to basics: Why choose an enterprise Business Intelligence tool, anyway?
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part I
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part II
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part I)
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part II)

Related whitepapers (PDF):

• MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

• MiPro Consulting: Oracle BI Services
• MiPro Consulting: SAP Business Objects Services
• MiPro Consulting: Resources

In our recent newsletter, two of our senior principal consultants wrote a quick bit about the differences in PeopleSoft invoice matching functionality from 8.9 to 9.0.  We get asked about this a lot, and for most users, the differences can be somewhat arcane.  Because of this, I’d like to share the article.

Differences in PeopleSoft Invoice Matching from 8.9 to 9.0: A High-level View

by April Black and Jack Kochie, Sr. Principal Consultants

From PeopleSoft 8.9 to 9.0, some of the invoice matching and processing rules changed significantly, and we find many of our clients don’t know about the changes in any sort of detail.  At a high-level, here are the biggest-hitting changes:

• 9.0 includes all features of prior releases
• Expanded document association included (e.g. receipt selection)
• Expanded rules engine (contexts: summary, tolerance, global), which provide:
  • More flexibility
  • Flow control (allows matching – i.e. check all or check first)
  • Summary rules
  • Rule tolerances
• Auto-matching with debit memos
• Configurable matching workbench
• Expanded workflow

As for what we get asked about steadily, it’s the intricacies of the rules engine.

Specifically, the flow control and the summary rules allow you to set a dollar threshold per invoice where the processing of the match exception difference is not cost effective to handle manually based upon the invoice charge and the purchase order comparison.  In other words, the small dollar exceptions are processed and matched, which means the remaining match exceptions are material and warrant the time required to contact vendors and manage the corrections.  The invoice differences that match within the tolerance are scheduled for payment, which improves the opportunity for payment discounts and timely payments.  In the end, overall process flow is improved and negative impact to the business is safeguarded.

Matching tolerances, flow, and action can be defined solely at the rule level or at a more granular level as in the past (e.g. by item category).  For example, if a contract with the supplier states freight is not charged on an invoice, the rule specific to the freight charges can be used and the flow defined to stop after this rule is triggered because freight was charged on the invoice.  Additional exceptions are not generated and the supplier is contacted to send a corrected invoice.  This means the matching configuration can be defined to focus on the invoice processing differences for your organization and business processes.

While the 9.0 enhancements are powerful, the new matching will require some time to review and evaluate the rule combinations to meet your business processing needs.  Doing so may reduce the number of exceptions generated for processing and generate exceptions for the material differences between invoices purchase orders and receipts.  The groundwork to get 9.0 matching running and optimized for your business might be intricate, but it’s an investment that pays for itself very quickly.