European Tire Wholesaler Upgrades to Intuitive Data Warehouse Solution

Founded as a one-man business in 1966, Netherlands-based tire wholesaler Heuver also boasts international teams in Germany, England, and Romania to help manage their expansive wholesale activity across Europe. With a range of more than 10,000 products, Heuver’s systems creates large volumes of data that need to be managed by a data warehouse for accurate reporting and BI dashboards.

The Challenge

In 2019, Heuver decided it was time to upgrade their ERP system and migrate from a 2009 instance of Microsoft Dynamics AX to the latest version of Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. Part and parcel to this move, however, was a need to do modernize their data warehouse, which was becoming more and more difficult to maintain.

Like many organizations, Heuver’s data warehouse was built using custom SQL coding, which left them dependent on a few skilled resources to maintain and update their system. “We had to rely on a consultant to make even the most simple updates,” recalled Thijs Selhorst, Heuver’s administrator of BI tooling. “It would take two days and was incredibly costly.” With the move from Dynamics AX to 365, it was the right time for Heuver to do work on their data warehouse.

When upgrading to Dynamics 365, Heuver also had several years of historic data they needed to migrate to ensure they could continue to run both comparative and trend reports, and comply with audit requirements. Migrating this data to the cloud and validating it would be very costly and time-consuming.

The Selection Process

Already connected to insightsoftware through their TARGIT BI reseller, Selhorst had been working with the team to maintain and extend Heuver’s existing data warehouse and OLAP cubes, implemented using standard Microsoft technology. As Heuver prepared to move from its legacy ERP to a cloud-based ERP, the transfer triggered a need for an extended data warehouse far beyond what their current setup was able to accommodate.

That’s when insightsoftware stepped in to discuss Jet Analytics. “First we went to our ERP partner, who had a product for BI tooling. But we did not get the business case for that,” Selhorst said. “So we went to our insightsoftware partner, Joost Tiggeler, and he provided a good business case with Jet Analytics. It was the first time I was introduced to Jet.”

Jet Analytics, insightsoftware’s data warehouse automation platform, enables Dynamics customers to accelerate and de-risk their BI projects without requiring specialist skills.
For Heuver, Jet Analytics also offered the possibility to mitigate the risk of data migration by avoiding the need to load historic data into Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, instead combining legacy AX and current Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations data in the data warehouse for reporting and analysis.

Impressed by both the capabilities and the affordability, Selhorst and his team decided to move forward with Jet Analytics.

Implementing Jet Analytics

Jet Analytics proved its worth immediately. “To set up the data warehouse, it was a lot faster with Jet. While I don’t know the exact time it took us to do the same thing with Visual Studio before, with Jet, it was less than 30 days,” Selhorst recalled.

The new data warehouse setup through Jet Analytics allowed Selhorst to easily access both current and legacy data. “The data warehouse is really simple,” Selhorst said. “It’s easy to get the data and I understand it. When there are questions I can answer it. I’m not a programmer, I don’t really understand SQL. I’m a finance guy,” he added. “If I can work with a data warehouse, then you know it’s really simple to use.”

Selhorst learned Jet Analytics both with a consultant and via two training sessions, and is confident in navigating the solution. “You can click, drag, and drop, then look at the outcomes. If it’s incorrect, there’s an error message that you can figure out by yourself.”

Navigating Success

Heuver joins many other insightsoftware customers who are successfully using TARGIT on top of Jet Analytics. Even with a BI solution, Jet Analytics proves to be a complementary and necessary tool that helps manage all the data. For Selhorst, it’s important that he can now manage the Jet Analytics environment. “Since I can use Jet Analytics by myself, we have a lot more freedom,” he said.

With the addition of Jet Analytics to their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and TARGIT instances, Heuver has experienced the following benefits:

• Quick time to value, with Jet Analytics up and running in less than 30 days
• 50% reduction in cost to maintain Jet Analytics over other options
• Self-serve data access that does not require a consultant or specialized SQL knowledge
• De-risked data migration by combining legacy and current data in the data warehouse for comparitive reporting and trend analysis

“Jet Analytics is so simple and cost-effective,” Selhorst concluded. “My background is finance and control, and even I can can work with this data warehouse.”