Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$14
per month per user
Prophix
Score8.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, is used to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making within a harmonized user experience. To reduce complexity and uncertainty, the software offers automated insights and planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and consolidation functionalities.
Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Prophix is best suited if you have a very extensive budgeting process that currently relies on multiple Excel spreadsheets. It is also great if you have on-prem tools that may no longer be supported for reporting. It may not be appropriate if you require an unlimited number of mid-tier users, as it can be very expensive annually. It's definitely not a cheap tool, but the cost can at least be optimized based on users' use cases. In both organizations I've worked for that use it, cost has been mentioned.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Ability to filter report views for report binder without creating duplicate reports.
More extensive documentation and examples in the ProCalc library.
More ProCalc functions that deal with the time dimension and allow functions that can utilize the system date. So if it is day 8 of the month.
Ability to save company color scheme for use in reporting.
Would like to create a link between the account dimension and another dimension so I can easily report on account properties. For example, an account property could be columns in a report.
Would like to see the ability to have a report view on a dashboard. The tables are poorly formatted, and I’d like more formatting ability.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I don't rate anybody a 10 because I believe there's always room for improvement, so I'll go with an 8. And I'm giving 8 because it has helped us do more than we were doing before, and I believe there's still room for improvement.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There have been very few times that Prophix has not been available and we have been informed ahead of time. The only issue that we have is when we update cubes or import information and run processes during working hours which stops access for a short period of time but this is more about our processes than Prophix.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
We’ve gotten moved around a lot and so we don’t always know our pod people. Also when we book sessions with a random person it seems like we have to take the first 15-20 minutes explaining our system and process.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Training is essential for this software to be successful for any company. We unfortunately had a bad implementation and training manager so I can say with confidence that if we had the CSM we have now - we would be light years ahead of our knowledge of the system. I highly suggest taking all training opportunities and not rushing the implementation training
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in real time without having to reconfigure clunky systems with expensive modifications
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Prophix is a capable tool of growing with an organization and the uses for different items in the software. Our organization was able to scale the product to lots of different end users and the needs of the departments. There are plenty of updates and features to grow and bring in new data.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.
