Analytics for LS Central

Analytics is built by LS Retail on Power BI, which is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence service in the cloud. When you use Analytics, you get access to reporting optimized data sets, and to all the Microsoft Power BI reports with their advanced calculations and relationships. It can be set up for LS Nav and LS Central on-premises from version 8.4 to the current versions, and for latest versions of LS Central SaaS.

When you have registered for a license, through the LS Retail License department, you can download the product package free of charge, to use as is, or as a base for your data warehouse and Business Intelligence environment.

For a more high-level description of the Analytics product or to request a demo, consult LSRetail.com.

Architecture and technical overview

The Analytics for LS Central architecture consists of a few components that are shown in the image above and can be explained from left to right.

Business Central – LS Central

First, you have the LS Central source database. This is your LS Central BackOffice database and it can be located in Azure, on a virtual machine, or on an on-premises server.

If the LS Central database is on-premises, the Integration runtime management gateway needs to be set up on a machine that is always running.

If LS Central is running as SaaS, an extra step is needed in the loading of the data from LS Central to Analytics.

The Azure Data Factory v.2 contains all the pipelines that collect and load the data from LS Central into the data warehouse.

Azure SQL Server – Data warehouse

The data warehouse dimension and fact tables, designed in a star schema, are stored in the Analytics SQL database.

Power BI service – Data model and reports

With the Analytics setup you get the Power BI templates containing the data models and reports.

Setup and onboarding

All of these Analytics components can be set up in a few simple steps that require no in-depth knowledge of data warehouses, report building, or Azure.