Halo has unlocked the data from the Dynamics AX safe

Prior to having a BI solution we were like many other companies I am sure. Exporting data straight from our ERP system into mostly Excel based reports. This was not only time consuming but also led to many errors in reporting, often having more than one version of the truth. That is why we decided to explore what our options were with BI. During our evaluation of many different BI vendors/software we quickly saw Halo rise above the rest. Halo Source is everything you need from a data warehouse, and cube creation perspective. On top of that, it is using full Microsoft based technology which makes the learning curve extremely fast, even for those non-developers. A deciding factor for Halo was the data quality module. Everyone has some form of dirty data, but Halo has a solution for that. It was the only company that offered this sort of feature and was a major reason we selected Halo as our business intelligence solution. You absolutely do not need to know how to write SQL to spin up your own data warehouse and cubes for use with Halo Prism. On the topic of Prism it is very streamlined visualization tool. Drag and drop with as many visual options as you would need. Prism has allowed us to gain insight into our data that we have struggled see. We truly believe that this will be one our most successfully projects that has the largest impact since our ERP implementation, and even then this is really the icing on the cake for our complete ERP suite.

Pros

Support from the point of sale and beyond. I have never been sold a product where the vendor kept constant contact even after the sale and install. Halo truly cares about their customers and their product, and we look forward to a long successful relationship with them. Prism is extremely user friendly, drag and drop measures and dimensions to quickly and easily answer questions about your business. Only software/solution to address data quality as a key part of the ETL process. Solution experts who really know my business and our ERP system. Training was exceptional. Prebuilt templates to address industry specific needs.

Cons

Wish we could have moved forward with our BI approval faster. This was on us not Halo we just were not sure as a Business what we wanted. But once we had our demo it was clear Halo was our top choice. Power BI put a wrench in this process giving pause from our Executives, but once I tried to replicate some reports in Power BI and saw how large the learning curve was and that it did not include the foundation of any BI solution (a data warehouse) Halo again was where we turned.

Halo Is a Good BI Tool for Not Needing High Skilled Front-End Users

We are spinning up cubes left and right to get at the data under JDE. We had no analytics/bi department prior to Halo. Now we are acting like a very advanced department with many subject areas being deployed each month. In just 6 months time, I now have Inventory, Account Ledger, Open Orders, and other things visualized and refreshing automatically everyday. Super excited about the future with this tool.

Pros

I like the flexibility it puts in the hands of the front end users. There is very little development time needed to "format charts" to be color schemes or certain column headers, etc. A front-end user can take on all that work in this tool. The main development is in building the cube and creating definitions on the backend for the facts, measures, and dimensions. Once that is done, the tool takes care of itself. I've used QlikView and Tabelau and Halo provides a nice consistent way of easy spin-up.

Cons

There is a steep learning curve in the beginning on all the settings associated with cubes, understanding processing order of operations, etc. Once you get a feel for that, things come together nicely. One major downfall is that everything "must" be in a cube with a time dimension. However, if you have non-time dimensional data you could just 'fake it', so it isn't a problem that can't be overcome. If you are used to using QlikView or something, where you can just load a dataset, you'll need to adapt to understand to use the front-end of Halo it needs to be in cube form.

Great tool and Excellent customer support

Pros

It's reliable and easy to use. Drag and drop interface makes it easier for users. It has a number of source connectors to pull the data from. Customer support is unmatched.

Cons

The installation process needs to be more simple.

Halo Review

It has taken a long time to implement, much of that is on us because of the way we decided to implement. I don't believe we were given sufficient advise in the beginning. We have since transferred to new account and project managers and things are moving along nicely. My advise would be to understand the software using simplified data first, once you have a good understanding of the extractions, transformations and how those translate through SQL to the BI tool, you are on your way to building a user friendly BI tool.

Pros

The ease of creating dashboards and reporting and the transparency and self service of the Data Warehouse.

Cons

The amount of time the BI tool takes to load and the high cost of upgrading to more bandwidth on the server.

Limited BI Tool

Great for a small companies making their first step into BI but maybe will be quickly outgrown, avoid if a mid to larger size company.

Pros

- Simple BI Toll great for small companies or simple requirements - Fair price point for services provided

Cons

- Limited customization - Challenging Integration to other systems - "You get what you pay for" is true with functionality vs. pricing