Many companies believe that holding weekly staff meetings will contribute tremendously to their organization since it provides the opportunity for managers and employees to review reports and discuss the work accomplished in the previous week and to plan what will be accomplished in the upcoming week. Yet, it is typical to hear clients during the due diligence referring to the reporting preparations for weekly meetings as a big issue because gathering the data and setting it in a correct layout can take from half a day to a day to complete.
Can you afford to have an employee spend a full day every week just to produce reports for meetings? It seems like a waste of time and resources and most of it, because of the manual data manipulation, can conribute to data errors. Therefore, the best solution to this will be to have your current ERP system integrate with a BI solution that will handle a significant amount of the reporting needs.
ERP systems usually have a reporting tool that provides a set of predetermined reports generated from the database using built-in inquiry functionality. It becomes cumbersome and expensive to customize them to be comprehensive to the users since it will require the employee to manipulate the data on excel or have an IT person develop the requested report. A Business Intelligence Solution will empower the users to develop information-rich reports right when they need them, and using real-time information. It will also empower them to use either pre-defined functions for simple reports, or use online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes when it is necessary to perform in-depth analysis.
The combination of an ERP system and Business Intelligence will help your team be more productive and efficient in producing their reports because they can rely on a BI solution with access to high-quality data and they can make better decisions aligned with corporate goals.
If you’re looking for specific ERP software information, check out the resources on the ERT Group website. You can also contact ERT Group for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs.
Article written by Andrea Garay, Senior Consultant – ERT Group
ERT Group is a Florida Microsoft Gold Certified Partner– offering Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Microsoft CRM.
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It is true that BI is very important when using ERP, but be very careful what you buy. Some BI tools do not simplify things for end users and unless you know the structure of the database, you’ll have a hard time creating the reports that you need.
For both BI and ERP products and how to select them, please visit: http://www.technologyevaluation.com and use our online decision support system.
To examine a downside of BI to Small & Medium Size Businesses (SMB) we should look to see what it takes for BI to be successful:
- A person with a “talent” for using the tool
- The same person having knowledge of how the ERP system is being used
- The same person with enough time to write the report, debug the report & verify the results
In smaller organizations there may be people with these requirements but these are usually key people helping to run the day to day activities of the business. An alternative is to find an ERP vendor that will support the writing of custom downloads. Custom downloads are generally easy for the vendor to write because there is no formatting of the report or the inquiry screen required.