How Relevant Business Intelligence Is In ERP Systems?

         

Data management is no more a chore when you have an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software installed. But most of these ERP systems lack Business Intelligence and are not able to provide adequate analysis of this preserved data.

Will it not be more beneficial if you can get actionable insights and solutions from all the collected data? Business Intelligence software will help you in that, but more if it is integrated into your ERP system in comparison to independent BI solutions connected to ERP systems. The difference between these two is explained later in this piece.  

For more clarity, it is important to first know what is business intelligence and what role it plays in ERP? So, to explain how it all works, this piece is a quick brief about that-

Business Intelligence

In the past, when ERP software was not there, businesses manually gathered data from multiple sources and for Business Intelligence related activities, they then analyzed these data to prepare some meaningful metrics. These metrics helped businesses in gaining insights and making decisions and choices.

Earlier, Business Intelligence (BI) was a very tedious process of report generation across the different functional areas of any given business, and then manipulating this data in spreadsheets to derive a static report.

Now, ERP software eases the process of gathering and imputing data instead of dealing with multiple separate applications.

Transformation of this raw data into meaningful metric to get insights is called business intelligence (BI).  

Why is Business Intelligence important?  

Getting reports is extremely crucial process in any business. You will need these reports to be able to make highly informed decisions across various verticals.

Business Intelligence and data both are valuable and core to good decision making. But now, the sheer amount of data that is gathered and stored has increased many folds. This has happened because ERP systems had made the internal business processes very easy.

Business intelligence incorporated in ERP offers benefits like-

l Trends are now much easier to predict. 

l In case of any challenges, businesses will be able to act in a proactive manner instead of being reactive.

After all, data availability does not implies making pretty reports. Instead the main purpose of it all is to see the trends. BI integrated ERP system makes that possible with more ease and in real-time.

Role of Business Intelligence in ERP?

BI is a great tool to add into your ERP for monitoring business performance in real-time.

To make the most of BI-

l You need to be aware of and precise in understanding that what drives your business?

l And the relevance of questions that should be asked in Business Intelligence.

The ERP solutions with integrated BI generates dynamic reporting and providing end users with what they want to look at and when they want it.

l Real-time data helps in fast decision-making.

l You get more than traditional reporting.

It is no-brainer that real-time data is relevant in taking long-term and short-term decisions. A quick glance to the dashboard will help the managers in fast and informed decision making process and identify the opportunities available for process improvement.

The Benefits of BI integrated ERP systems-

1. Modern BI software makes it possible for everyone to quickly access a customized dashboard displaying the most relevant KPI based intuitive data visualizations.

2. BI integrated with ERP enables highly consistent reporting process and at the same time eliminate the requirement of delivering a lot of reports because each manager will be looking at the same data set and they are able to summarize that data directly.

3. In addition to this, ad hoc reporting is presented in form of cubes that is very easy to understand for non-technical people. Raw data is stored in cubes and can be sliced and diced. The data entered through the ERP systems can be transformed and stored in a hierarchical cube.

4. The users are able to drill down into a specific cube configuration and generate customized reports on the data they require. All this can be done in real-time.

5. Now, the charting and query found in Excel and Power BI are built directly into most of the ERP systems. This reduces the number of applications and tools needed to be deployed.

6. ERP is relying more on Cloud for analytics.

7. Data collaboration among employees is not easy with the traditional ERP systems. BI integrated ERP enables easy collaboration and share among employees.

8. BI software is a robust system that can take data from multiple outside sources.

Data-driven decision making is increasing and these BI-enabled ERP systems offer scope and improvement in doing comparative analysis such as information across the product lines in manufacturing industries with the help of BI cubes.

Independent BI solutions were not able to prove how they were arriving at those results or numbers whereas BI integrated to ERP is fully linked with the underlying transaction history. This enables trust in the ERP system and the solutions they are providing with the help of BI-integration in them.

Conclusion

The combined abilities of sophisticated BI tools and ERP give managers the power needed for sound data-based decisions. While ERP efficiently gathers the data, Business Intelligence does the adequate analysis of the provided data.

With the increase in data collection and handling being able to make quick decisions with the power of BI and ERP will prove beneficial for businesses.