By: Mich Martins, CEO, MWare
For too long, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have included inferior native dashboards that offer few of the benefits of true business intelligence (BI). It’s time to do better, and luckily the solution needn’t be as painful as a forklift upgrade.
Old-school ERP reporting
Many ERP solutions have ‘dashboards’ offering insights into business areas like cash flow, debtors’ days and creditors information, but these are extremely elementary and inflexible in what they can offer.
By contrast, modern BI offers highly advanced capabilities like dynamic self-service reporting, collaboration, and unrestricted analytics, allowing clients to slice and dice the data they’re presented with to their specific needs.
The reason for this chasm is that ERP systems are not built for reporting but transactional activities, which generate in the thousands of tables as part of their operation that are innately difficult to report from. Tables often also store data to be transaction optimised and not report optimised, making them unsuitable for reporting.
To get actionable intelligence out of such solutions often require getting technical consultants in to deal with specific architectures, resulting in great cost and delay.
Keep the baby, ditch the bathwater
Why be happy with such obviously dated BI in your ERP?
The great news is you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Today, leading-edge BI capabilities are readily accessible through BI partner integration programmes with leading vendors, raising expectations among ERP clients and narrowing the field of choice down considerably.
Proven expertise, proven results
As ERP integrators we have been called in countless times for assistance with ERP reporting, becoming highly attuned to the need for this and the capabilities required to achieve it.
In partnership with our BI vendor partner, we have succeeded in developing dynamic new views of complex ERP data structures rather than relying on denormalised reports – allowing for more dynamic reporting capabilities that enable customers to better filter and slice and dice data, as well as drawing custom reports.
Using ERP data structures allows delivery of these reports with terminology already known to the business user, making self-service a more realistic possibility. And the fact that data is manipulated at a ‘view-only’ level (removed from the source), allows said self-service to be governed – that is, without the risk of breaking things.
Then there’s the very real cost consideration of removing the need for expensive architectural consulting expertise through direct views into the source data – in conclusion, the decision to modernise existing ERP solutions with a BI plug-in becomes a very easy one.
Just the beginning
Operational insights for your ERP system at low cost and with none of the risk of breaching financial data integrity – all within easy reach of the business. It must seem like heaven to a user base so long deprived of actionable intelligence.
But once you’ve had a taste of real insight, there’s so much more you can do. Operational Insights is a steppingstone towards mouth-watering BI capabilities like Assisted Insights, Storyboards, Signals and many others, which bring a totally new approach to reporting and BI.
Assisted insights refers to the automation of reporting – and even the interpretation of reporting – using natural language. Storyboards are one way to present this in a way that allows business users to get maximum insight in ways they can understand and bring their particular expertise to bear. Signals is a totally autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) engine that monitors data for anomalies and exceptions, then uses assisted insights to auto generate reports and present this to the user in a social-style timeline – mobile, if necessary.
Do you need it?
Absolutely. With more and more data, it is becoming almost impossible for humans to get through the clutter. Big data structures take extremely long to run and have a huge amount of detail in them – literally millions of detailed lines. These modern tools use AI and machine learning to help with understanding, often yielding new insights never known before.
The time and effort to build and then run reports, including having to wait a few hours every time to get the desired result, can be bypassed by using signals to run in the background and surface exceptions that need to be looked at.
Empowered
In summary, operational insights offer dynamic BI views that present as familiar reporting interfaces in legacy ERP applications, allowing you to filter through all the noise to get to the answer a lot quicker; collaborate and make decisions; task people to act; and even track the execution of decisions and tasks – all in one place.
Once that is in place, you can start putting leading-edge functionalities like signals on top of it to look at specific trends and predict the future. Events that may have had an unknown impact on your business in the past can now be identified. Positives can be replicated in the future and negatives can be eradicated.
Look for platforms that offer this and that provide not just reporting/dashboards, but also additional workflow, monitoring, collaboration and even decision-voting features, allowing management to not just monitor, but make decisions, kick off tasks based on these decisions, and follow up on the execution of their decisions – all in one platform.
All in all, operational insights empower you with the insights and views into the business that you require – quickly, easily and at lower cost.
About MWare
MWare is a team of business solutions specialists, serving South African, African and international clients, customers and fellow business partners with integrated business automation and business process solutions. MWare collaborates with resellers all over the world, in countries like Canada, the USA, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and our neighbouring countries. Current focus areas include Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
www.mware.co.za
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