The Benefits of Business Intelligence in ERP Solutions

Integrating business intelligence into enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions is one of the most impactful ways of leveraging your company’s financial data to make informed business decisions. In this article, we look at some of the benefits of business intelligence in ERP solutions and outline ways to get help with business intelligence implementation and analytics.

What Is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users (particularly CEOs, CFOs, and other financial executives) make better business decisions.

BI can be delivered through an individual business intelligence consultant, but it can also be delivered technologically through applications that can include:

• Statistical analyses
• Reporting
• Predictions and forecasting
• Data processing and interpretation

Today’s BI applications are typically web-based software solutions that rely on a centrally managed database or queries against a standard corporate data warehouse.

By giving end-users anytime access to up-to-date key metrics through dashboards and scorecards that are tailored to their roles in the organization, BI tools help organizations focus attention on important changes, exceptions, and trends as they happen.

Some Key Differences Between Business Intelligence and an ERP

There are some areas of overlap, but in short, ERP collects business data, and BI is the technology (or technologies) that analyze, interpret, and display that data in useful ways to enhance decision-making.

Other differences include:

• ERPs focus on linking areas of the business together, such as manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution; BI does not concern itself with this
• ERP collects and centralizes data; BI processes and interprets it
• ERP focuses on historical and current data; BI can extrapolate future (predicted) data
• ERP delivers value at the operational level; BI delivers value at the strategic level

Benefits of Business Intelligence in ERP

There are several reasons why financial executives would want to integrate BI into their ERP(s). At a high level, these include:

Identifying new growth opportunities: Using BI in ERP improves leadership’s ability to determine where to focus their efforts. Your business's data helps you make better decisions and better understand what needs to be done next. This can help your company grow, expand, and identify new growth opportunities for the future.

Enhanced decision-making: When you can trust the information that your ERP solution generates, you can get a more accurate and complete picture of what is happening in your business. With this knowledge, you can see trends and correlations between different events that might not be visible if you don’t have a unified view of all of your data.

Better compliance: BI can provide insights into all aspects of business performance, from supply chain management to resource allocation, so it makes sense that it could also help guide you through new regulations and provide the data insights you need to respond quickly when necessary.

How Blytheco Can Help

Business intelligence and analytics can be the difference between a successful business and one that fails. Integrating BI into ERP solutions offers long-term sustainable benefits that can give your business an edge over your competitor, and it all starts with finding the right business intelligence consultant.

If you are looking for support in realizing the benefits of business intelligence in ERP solutions, contact us today. We offer a range of business intelligence consulting solutions and have particular expertise in ERP implementation and integration with BI, as well as specialist software products like Acumatica, Sage Intacct, and Sage X3.