Business Intelligence has become critical today for enterprises to draw insights on data generated from across the company and make informed decisions to spur growth. The data is typically drawn by connecting to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used by the different departments in the company, such as manufacturing, operations, accounting, and sales. The ERP integrates the different process flows in an organization, breaking siloes and unifying data to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of the business. Together, BI and ERP make a business agile and responsive to trends and changes, improving its chances of success.
ERP and BI: Why these two systems must go hand-in-hand
The ERP software helps organizations automate and optimize all critical operational processes such as finance, supply chain, production management, and HR. While this frees up resources to focus on more strategy and innovation, it also provides a unified view of all data through a centralized database. With this cross-functional insight, businesses gain a holistic view to capture trends, identify opportunities, and enable continuous improvement in cost management, time management, and people management.
The ERP system can be called a process management software for managing and integrating the different processes, centralizing data, and thereby improving the efficiency of the organization. BI can be considered the next step after the ERP where the data generated by the processes is organized, analyzed, and contextualized to gain actionable insights. It uses an online transaction processing (OLTP) system to process data.
Aiding ERP in providing actionable insights to improve operational efficiency, develop a high-level strategy, and respond to market demands in an agile manner is business intelligence. Business intelligence, built on an online analytical process (OLAP) system, facilitates multidimensional analytical capabilities to strengthen competitiveness and increase profitability. It generates reports and dashboards that enhance understanding of the data and devise timely and relevant plans for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
One of the key differences between an ERP and BI is that the ERP aids in increasing operational efficiency by identifying areas of improvement. BI, on the other hand, enhances the understanding through data enrichment for performance monitoring and identifying trends that can help with creating strategies by analyzing data at both granular and top levels.
It can be used to save costs while optimizing resource utilization to drive growth.
Advantages of Integrating Business Intelligence and ERP
Today, businesses have access to and ingest large volumes of data, including structured and unstructured. This makes organizing, storing, and analyzing data at scale a challenge. With predictive modeling gaining importance and businesses moving away from historical reporting, integration of ERP and BI helps businesses leverage Big Data and make their company future-ready. This becomes possible by integrating ERP with BI. Not only can new strategies be based on the past but also by identifying future trends and patterns.
Business Intelligence needs the data stored in the ERP systems for analytics, which, by unifying data from different information, helps get a clearer picture that helps form business strategies. For instance, a manufacturing company can identify patterns, watch trends, and plan its production schedule to meet the demand and become more profitable. It can plan its raw material purchases based on the schedule, reducing costs on unwanted inventory. It can tap new markets based on where the demand for its products is expected to be high. The possibilities expand based on how well the business is able to leverage its ERP data using appropriate BI tools.
Briefly, the integration of ERP systems with BI can provide the following benefits:
Gain Actionable Insights: Running BI on ERP-generated data can help businesses gain insights for devising strategies and improving efficiencies.
Customization: Each department can use the integrated BI-ERP system to generate customized reports and dashboards to decide their team’s objectives.
Predictive Analytics: BI provides predictive analytics and modeling while ERP provides a historical perspective, providing enterprises with a comprehensive view of their past, present, and future to improve business agility.
Real-time Decision-Making: Businesses need a real-time view of data to be able to respond quickly and improve faster decision-making.
Orbit for Integrating ERP and BI
Orbit Reporting and Analytics solution is a cloud-native reporting and analytics solution that integrates with any ERP to provide businesses with insights needed for faster and data-backed decision-making. This cloud- and the platform-agnostic solution works very well with leading ERP solutions such as EBS, Fusion Cloud, PeopleSoft, and Netsuite, to leverage ERP data for breaking barriers to innovation and creating meaningful strategies. Its self-service capabilities help business users customize the reports and dashboards to generate insights to improve performance. The pre-built report templates accelerate the reporting process for faster decision-making. By providing a holistic view of data stored in the cloud and on-premise, in structured and unstructured formats, Orbit empowers businesses to face competition with greater confidence and agility.
To know more about the Orbit’s BI solution, visit: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/orbit-business-intelligence/
To know more about how it can integrate with the following tools, visit the links below:
Orbit’s integration with Oracle EBS – https://www.orbitanalytics.com/oracle-e-business-suite-integration/
Orbit’s integration with Oracle Fusion – https://www.orbitanalytics.com/oracle-cloud-applications-integration/
Orbit’s integration with Netsuite – https://www.orbitanalytics.com/netsuite-integration/
Orbit’s integration with PeopleSoft – https://www.orbitanalytics.com/peoplesoft-integration/