Paper Title: ERP and BI: When 1 + 1 = 3
Author: Cindy Jutras, Vice President, Research Development & Research – Aberdeen Group
Most of the companies form Small to Medium size are now implementing ERP system for better expanses control and growing the revenue. ERP provide a one centralized environment include all needed capabilities such as finance, inventory, HR, and purchase. The centralized data make it easier to control, manage and integrate data. And later to help in building a successful BI project.
ERP Benefits
The paper provided a statistic about the potential sources of business benefit of ERP based in a survey conducted from medium companies. The business benefit is very from company to company based on their goals and objectives. But 21% of the companies that are using best-in-class ERP systems agreed on that most business return from ERP is came from improveming complete and on-time shipments, while 20% came from improvement in internal schedule compliance and reduction in inventory levels, and other 14% went to reduction of administrative cost and reduction in operational cost.
Strategies Align
ERPs helped the companies to standardizing and streamlining business process. As of any software, (Panorama Consulting Group, 2019) ERP function can be implemented in different ways:
- Out-of-the-Box: ERPs came with many templates for processes according to the leading best practices which can be implemented directly to the company.
- Custom: where all processes should be defined and designed based on the company needs.
Connecting the Dots
The challenge for the decision makers now is not only to take a quick decision, but also to deal with the huge amount of data. Here the need to BI solution is raised. Most of ERP systems nowadays come with the capability to export the data to excel for example and work to do the required analysis but still it’s offline data. And it will reach a point where will be outdated. But by using BI, we will make sure the analysis happens online and up to date.
According to (financesonline.com, 2019) more than 46% of small companies are using BI.
Use Case
Joerns Healthcare is a mid-sized company that work in healthcare field. In 2007 the company was a division of Sunrise Medical. By that they re-organized all IT infrastructure including ERP. By then, they invested in all-on-one SAP ERP system where it used all over the company and in every branch. By September 2008, when on spot data became a requirement, then the need for BI is raised. After implementing the SAP BI solution, the management was able to access a dashboard viewing all sales with ability to graph and chart online within the web browser interface. Also, later the solution provided a drill-down function till the transactional level.
Quality of the Research
The paper was reach of statistics and figures about the ERP implementations and benefits. But, the paper did’t consider at all the analytics capabilites of BI. Other than that, the ideas on the paper was clear.
Quality of Presentation
The paper was well organized and all ideas was supported by statistics and charts.
References
- Cindy Jutras, ERP and BI: when 1+1=3 , Aberdeen Group, 2009 http://www.findwhitepapers.com/force-download.php?id=11875
- Panorama Consulting Group, Sep 23, 2019, How to Determine ERP Customization and Configuration Needs. https://www.panorama-consulting.com/erp-customization/
- https://financesonline.com/20-essential-business-intelligence-statistics-analysis-of-trends-data-and-market-share/
