Does Your ERP Have Enough (Business) Intelligence?

When defining your enterprise resource planning (ERP) requirements, make business intelligence (BI) a top priority. You could deploy the most robust ERP solution in terms of data collection, but if you haven’t factored in sufficient business intelligence capabilities, the data your ERP captures will not be very valuable or useful. It’s one thing to collect the right data; it’s another thing to make sense of the troves of information to make sound business decisions – which is precisely what BI does.

BI= Real-Time Performance Dashboard

Whereas ERP provides the mechanism to capture, tag, and organize data from disparate departments and business units across your organization, BI serves as a performance dashboard that pulls that information together to equip users at all levels to find out, in real time and in terms that they understand, what’s happening within their areas of the business.

How does this translate into tangible business benefits? What exactly do you gain when your ERP offers powerful business intelligence capabilities?

Pull real-time comprehensive reports in less time, without having to wait till month-end

Having to wait till month-end to create reports? If so, how much is the delay in receiving critical performance information costing your company – due to undetected market price fluctuations, lost revenue opportunities, and so forth? What if you could uncover systemic issues at any point during the month, quarter, or whatever period – to make the adjustments you need to hit your numbers? The right BI dashboard integrated with your ERP solution will give you this capability.

Also, how much time does it take your staff to pull comprehensive reports together, especially when they must include data inputted from across the entire enterprise? One company (see case study) cut their company-wide sales report-gathering time from 40 hours, down to two hours, using a BI solution tailored to their operations. That’s a 95-percent reduction in staff hours to create reports, significantly lowering costs associated with report generation and freeing those employees to focus on more productive tasks.

Use BI to compare budgets, forecasts, and plans to actual performance in real-time. Uncover and correct potential business issues before they blow up into major crises that could derail your company.

Find and access the right information – quicker and easier

Organize and display real-time data from your ERP or CRM (customer relationship management) system in a way that makes sense to you—and then search that information according to specific criteria. BI helps provide you with the information your employees need to forecast and make business decisions,  where they can quickly and easily drill down into information and analyze data in multiple ways.

Make informed, confident business decisions

The right business intelligence (BI) solution improves business performance by driving better decision-making throughout your organization. When you’re confident that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust that all your decisions will help you create competitive advantage and achieve corporate objectives.

To learn more about tailoring a robust BI solution for your organization – to transform your business data into the knowledge you need to make informed, confident business decisions – contact ERT Group at 954-825-0888.

Enterprise Resources Technology Group, Inc. (ERT Group) is a technology consulting firm that empowers companies to grow and succeed with business solutions that streamline processes, impove productivity, and squeeze more profit from operations. ERT Group is a Florida Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a 2010 President’s Club member for Microsoft Dynamics – offering Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics ERP.