Power your business with ERP and BI combo!

According to Aberdeen Group, Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provides precise, real-time data about daily operations and helps companies reduce operating expenses by 23% and management costs by 22%. ERP is an enterprise's mainstay technology that gathers, analyzes, and shares insights among numerous departments, like manufacturing, sales, operations, Human Resources, and accounting, through a single database. While they are eminent at linking the dots between business operations to find efficiencies, with the extensive data entered into a system continually working to maintain and accumulate these records, your ERP requires a stepping-stone to capitalize on its value. Here's where Business Intelligence or (BI) technology steps in to deliver insight, simplify real-time data analysis, and present visual clarity for smarter decision-making.

Let's discuss how BI can support your ERP to increase your company's efficiency and pave the way to business success.

Enhance information accessibility and usability

Your ERP does its job to consolidate and capture every piece of data – from inventory management, accounting and finances, human resources, customer relationship management, operations and production, and more. The purpose is to extract what this data means for your business. 

Business intelligence makes this achievable more smartly. BI brings essential data to the fore and makes it more comprehensible for faster analysis and decisions.

Humans have information processing systems that work in a way that is individually unique to us. BI solutions, built to improve user capability, make it more comfortable for each individual to digest the data faster. Apart from empowering individuals to feel effective by their skill sets and the impact of their actions at large, it also equips your organization to have deeper insights on performance when various perspectives can access the same information.

Make KPIs observable and actionable with dynamic, real-time dashboards

With access, simplicity and usability come into action. To bridge the gap between known data and impactful corporate change, actionable items must be recognized.

What moves these actionable items? Defining each vital component of your enterprise through specific KPIs and metrics that you find the most figurative of success permits your association to kindle contemplative discussion and take action. Your metrics must be essential both to what they directly measure and the company's overarching goals as a whole.

Through effective visualizations that graphically picture this data in its most representative format, BI dashboards deliver transparency and context to what’s existed all along. Now, it’s about bringing them into focus and optimizing them, so you stay aware and informed. This level of operational intelligence leads to: 

• Improved responsiveness with charts/graphs/reports that automate in real-time.
• Keeps you connected with all the moving parts of your company. 
• Standardized reporting ensures higher reliability with consistent, streamlined, and well-maintained metrics with real-life data. 

Deliver faster and more informed decisions

Across all businesses, irrespective of size, structure or sector, decisions are only so effective if they are based on accurate, transparent, accessible, and relevant data. Through implementing a BI integrated ERP system, dashboards highlight what is more important, so data-backed decisions are taken on time.

A BI solution works harder, so you can work smarter. BI proactively structures your data from various sources and renders it to be useful for the longer term and available at the moment's need. This implies that the back-end hours and resources spent formatting or extracting data from your ERP each time you need to report will be mitigated and reallocated for better uses. 

Saving time up front can allow your team to dedicate efforts and time towards digging and understanding the roots of your data sources and the insights they may hold. 

Gain preparedness with what-if analytics

While informative, the descriptive analytics capability of ERP systems limits businesses to only comprehend what has happened by analyzing historical data. Effective reporting needs the context of past occurrences to help as guiding resources. Still, BI delivers the auxiliary framework to execute what-if analytics that links this data to comprehend opportunities for future metric performance. 

What-if analytics can:

• Eliminates risks beforehand
• Strengthen your business plan by analyzing the potential outcomes of various strategic decisions and moves.
• Visualization and dashboards add a crucial layer by breaking down data into understandable graphical representations, making it easier for you to look for growth opportunities and manage plausible and predictable challenges.

It’s imperative for businesses today to prioritize and focus on matters and decisions based on their relevance and importance. With the combined power of ERP and BI, you can save time for more important things and empower a sustainable and scalable data-driven culture.