From Ukraine to Australia: Alexandra's Inspiring Journey in Tech, Yoga, and Microsoft Dynamics BC

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Sydney, new South Wales, australia. That's where I report into business-wise. She's an ERP consultant in Microsoft Dynamics BC at Valrata. She was first awarded MVP in 2022. She's a proud mum of two and a Bicram Yoga enthusiast. I want to unpack that feeling the heat doing yoga. She is particularly interested in exploring how they can bring together different technologies to solve complex challenges with real-world problems. As always, full links to her show notes, bio, etc. Will be in the show notes for this episode. Alexandra. Welcome to the show.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 1:48
Hi everyone. Hi Mark, thank you for having me.

Mark Smith: 1:51
Good to have you on Now. I can detect an accent. Where do you originate from?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 2:03
Australia for over 15 years. But back in 2019, before pandemic, we lived for five years in the United States, in Boston. Then we came back again to Sydney. It's been four years. Sydney introduced me to ERP, sydney introduced me to Microsoft technology. That's an interesting part to be back and change career.

Mark Smith: 2:41
Yeah, Before we unpack your journey into this side of Microsoft business applications, tell us a bit about your family, your favorite foods and what you do for fun when you're not working at Bicram Yoga.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 2:57
I forgot what I have been working a lot recently. I forgot what I'm not doing when I'm not working. I have a family in Sydney. I have two young girls, two daughters. Bicram has been my passion since I was a student. Again. I was introduced in Sydney. I went to Sydney Church of the University. I did my master degree in accounting. Bicram Yoga was just across the street. It helped me to distress and settle as an immigrant student in Sydney. It's stayed my life till now.

Mark Smith: 3:36
Wow, let me get this right. Bicram Yoga is when you do yoga in a room that is heated to a certain temperature.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 3:45
Exactly. Yes, it's nine to minutes in a sort of the temperatures up to sauna, but you can find nice sports. You can put your mat next to the door and have a bit of breeze during the exercises. It's not for everyone. I personally love it. I found it's very relaxing and distressing and unwinding and helped me to more worn with things. But not for everyone, it's individual choice.

Mark Smith: 4:15
How did it come about? Like you know, traditional yoga, you know you grab your yoga mat and a couple of blocks and things like that and you can do it pretty much anywhere. Who introduced the concept of heat into the mix and what was the idea of adding heat to doing yoga workout?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 4:32
Well, there was a yoga founder a big crumb yoga founder that was based in California. I had a bit of bad publicity recently regarding all other stuff, but the idea was and it resonates with me is that heat helps you to stretch your muscles quicker than normal. Usually, if you're not flexible by nature, then it's more difficult to get into yoga and get into routine, which is consistency. But then when you do that in heat up room, it helps you not to feel that pain and get a bit more deeper in your practice and they build up a consistent like a routine of exercises that involve all muscles in your body during the 90 minutes of the practice.

Mark Smith: 5:24
Very cool. Tell me about food.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 5:27
Food, I eat everything, I love everything, I love traveling and I'm an adventure in the food to explore different food and different traditions. I think that's the beauty of our life that we can explore different tastes and different cultures and traditions.

Mark Smith: 5:49
Interesting Good. It would be remiss of me not to talk about Ukraine. I've had many MVPs on the show from Ukraine and we've discussed it at length. We've done a dedicated show just on the situation there. Tell me about your. How are you feeling? What's going on for you in that respect?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 6:09
Well, that's very sad. It's terrible what's happening. I do have family there. My family is in the city that has not been impacted as much as other cities, but I do have a lot of friends based in Sydney, in particular, and back in Boston. I think that their families was devastated by this. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's the recent end at this stage. My brother was taken to the army, and that's something that we all live and have to cope day by day.

Mark Smith: 6:44
Yeah, horrible situation. As we jump into your experience in your history and your origin story of tech, you mentioned that you started an accounting. Was that, then, a logical progression into software or the software side with ERP?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 7:05
Yeah, my story is interesting. I got by luck anyway. In Boston I had amazing boss and I was hired for the position of system accountant to migrate from Microsoft grade plans into Salesforce. That was my first introduction to train everyone on new software to find to improve business processes with a new ERP implementation. I love it. After that experience we flew back to Sydney and I was given an opportunity to join a small Microsoft partner in Sydney where I was exposed to CRM, business Central, power BI. That's where it all started. Never look back.

Mark Smith: 7:58
Wow, did you ever work with NaviGen or NAV?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 8:02
No, I don't have experience with NaviGen. I learned so when I start my job as a Business Central consultant. They documentation was available for Norwegian previous one, the one that is back back time so it was useful to you to learn some areas of your business central using our Norwegian.

Mark Smith: 8:24
So when we look at what you're working on, let's say since the start of this year, what are your priority focus areas? Business central is a growing applications a lot of areas to it. What's are you specializing more in? Warehouse management or general ledger? What's the areas that you focus in with the product?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 8:48
On day to day. We focus in mostly finance, with inventory, not warehouse, trans warehouse, not as deep, but what I'm focusing is reporting. I'm focusing on reporting on what's available. What business central migrating and ways developing into better financial reporting tool again Power BI and that's what our clients want, Because I believe accounting is moving from just not a rational part of the business, it's moving into analytical part of the business to take advantage of analyzing your data. What business central helps our clients to simplify day to day using GL accounts by introducing posting groups and help accountants and finance teams focus on, be more creative and utilize that data and make better decisions in the future.

Mark Smith: 9:49
What do you think the impact of AI is going to have on the finance operation inside organizations in the coming years?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 9:59
Well, it's a long journey yet there's a lot of impact right now that simplifying actually produce a great tool. It still needs a human supervision, but it's amazing to use for drafts and to utilize them to simplify some repetitive technical task. We are far away from having it replacing someone else job, but I guess we all know from as a form of accountants. We all know that what used to be bookkeeper, it's already basically not existing position because it can be replaced. We all need to use our intelligence, our creativity to bring better decisions for the business.

Mark Smith: 10:48
So I take it, power BI is one of the main tools that you're using.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 10:54
No, it's not the main one I'm using. Main one for my job today is business central. But yes, power BI is one of the tools we're using.

Mark Smith: 11:03
Okay, so before, when you're talking about, you're doing a lot in the area of reporting. When we look at the continuum of reporting, there can be reporting on historic data which I can't do anything about. It was history, it's what happened. If we go through the reporting lifecycle, we update to what's happening in real time to then, if you're like with algorithms and fused, you can be predictive around the future. Are your customers at that maturity level that they're looking at? How can we make informed decisions on what we're going to do in the next quarter or the next half year based on our historical data, but also what we're predicting to happen in the future in our business?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 11:45
You can use for requesting capabilities of business central power BI is there too. Of course, that's a part of being analytical creative with your historical data to make better future finance decisions.

Mark Smith: 12:05
What training do you recommend people do to really develop their skills in that analytics area, to be able to understand where an organization is at, but also to be able to advise, to take them into a future state that makes them more informed, more capable of making those decisions based on data?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 12:31
Well, I'm not sure about the training in particular. I think that's a complex right, complex of few different skills that come together. But what I'm looking from my perspective and what I'm seeing from our clients' engagement is moving to more robust ERP systems that gives you that capabilities. So if we stay with the previous generation accounting systems, that's where you meet your limitations. By introducing Business Central to business, you unleash the more availability for your team to analyze the data, to work on other priorities and be more up-to-date with the technologies. The same Business Central helps not only with the reporting right. It has great capabilities with integration. You can use it in Teams. You can use it with Power Platform for approvals and a lot of time-consuming with making it like a lot of team members involved in sort of bureaucratical steps that needs to be done and they are manual in businesses. That's where Power Platform helps. That's where Teams you can simplify those processes. You can eliminate Excel templates. You can eliminate hard copy approvals. Make it simple, make it easy. Free the rest of the time for more innovative approach.

Mark Smith: 14:13
What are you seeing from a maturity level around and I don't know, because my area of expertise is definitely not in Business Central Do you see, are you having clients that fully embed functionality from BC into Microsoft Teams and via Power Apps? Is that becoming a common scenario?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 14:34
It's becoming a very common interest from the client. Yes, but I don't see it that it's widely used yet as I would like to, but it's going that way.

Mark Smith: 14:50
Yeah, one of the things I'm seeing in the SAP space is using Power Virtual Agents to query data from Teams. So you can ask a chap what's the inventory level of X or Y? This purchase order came in. Here's the purchase order number. What's the status of it? Blah, blah, blah. Is those scenarios also happening with BC?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 15:12
Yes, exactly, then it's the more we, microsoft, invest into product development and get much easier to use. So those low-code solutions with chat boards become much easier to use to end users without involving consultant or developer.

Mark Smith: 15:36
Tell me, how did you become an MVP?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 15:38
That's interesting. The first one introduction was with Tatiana Pupko, who has been MVP for five or six years. She's based in Spain with a background in Russia. I was based in Sydney with background in Ukraine For some period of time. We collaborate, we work together. She introduced me to co-presenting on some community events. We end up delivering great session in the directions for partners last year in Germany. That was a huge thank you to Tatiana. She has been instrumental in introducing me to MVP community, introducing me to help you how expert engage with each other, how strong this community is and supporting. That was the initial one. And then I was lucky enough to meet another MVP, manon. We see that based in Sydney and she's simultaneously my colleague in Valrada. She has been just amazing and inspirational leader model for me that I was looking up for. That's all together. Come to MVP vote.

Mark Smith: 17:04
Interesting. I met Tatiana in 2019 in Seattle as when I first met her and I've had her on the show as well. Fantastic to see that connection happening across the community. When you presented at directions, did you fly there, did you go there or were you doing it?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 17:21
Yes, you have the older direction for partners. They have in person sessions. So, yes, I did fly. My company, valrada, has supported that, so it was amazing and thank you to them for such a great experience. That was a highlight of my MVP journey to MVP.

Mark Smith: 17:43
Yeah, how many MVP summits have you done now?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 17:46
I haven't done none yet, so I haven't attended them yet.

Mark Smith: 17:52
Were there many virtual sessions on in the recent MVP summit. There might be, but unfortunately I wasn't able to attend any yet Okay, because I'm still going through the playbacks and the recordings of a lot of those sessions myself there, because I didn't attend either. But there's so much new content. Of course, with Microsoft Build happening this week, there's all that stuff that we learned a month ago is now becoming out to the public. What excites you most about the future of the business? Central product.

Alexandra Horbatenko: 18:31
Well, probably most of all that. How much reporting would be available out of business central AI co-pilot Amazing. I want to see how our clients will take advantage of that too.

Mark Smith: 18:46
Yeah yeah. It definitely seems to be changing every part of our industry. Finally, before I let you go, what advice would you have for others that want to become MVP?

Alexandra Horbatenko: 19:02
I think that's just engage with the community. It's amazing community to find your niche, find what you're passionate about and find the people who will support you. There are so many great experts and enthusiastic people in this community. You will find your bunch of people and you will be feeling supported on your way to MVP. But it's mostly about your passion and what you like to do. Mvp hasn't changed anything for me personally. It's just great to have, but what I've done for the community and what I'm doing for the community, how my level of my engagement is staying the same.

Mark Smith: 19:45
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.