If a business is going to successfully operate competitively, it needs to expand its analytics processes beyond the rearview mirror. Incontext analytics derived from both historical information and realtime data provide more accurate and intuitively structured intelligence. Accessing this information through a builtin BI tool within an ERP environment enhances the process and empowers users to improve business outcomes in real time.
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RESOURCE PLANNING
SOFTWARE IS YOUR
BEST BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOL
Trang 2WHY COMPANIES WANT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 1
BUILT-IN MEANS BETTER ACCESSIBILITY 2
CONCLUSION 3
ABOUT IFS 4
Trang 3WHY ERP IS YOUR BEST BI TOOL
WHY ENTERPRISE RESOURCE
PLANNING SOFTWARE IS YOUR BEST
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOL
RICK VEAGUE IFS CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
With the explosion of Big Data in recent years, more companies are increasingly
interested in gathering the enormous amounts of information their business generates
and mining some sort of intelligence from it Like a diamond in the rough, this
information can be analyzed to reveal a goldmine of trends, patterns, successes and
failures about their business’s processes The idea is that they become enlightened
by this new-found intelligence and use it to develop and measure key performance
indicators (KPIs) to help them make decisions about how their business can become
more efficient and competitive in the future
WHY COMPANIES WANT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
At its core, business intelligence (BI) is really a euphemism for, “What’s going on in
my business? Am I making money? Where am I doing well? Where do I need to
improve?” These are all good things to know But entering orders and buying a part
(which is what enterprise resource planning (ERP) software tools help you do)
doesn’t tell you if you are ordering from the right vendor with the best price and
best on-time delivery You must measure and track KPIs to know if the business is
doing well or not And to calculate KPIs, you must first gather the information and
analyze it Having intuitive analytics capabilities built into your ERP solution allows
users to easily access the right intelligence, at the right place and at the right time, to
make smarter decisions
Many companies use data warehouses to store information from throughout their
enterprise to develop KPIs We know that data warehouses tend to trail reality
Information is gathered from last week, last month and last year and is then sent over
to the data warehouse, but the information stored in it always lags behind what’s
going on right now This historical data is useful because some KPIs can only be
calculated after enough of a historical track record or view of data has accumulated
so that you can actually look back on it and do an analysis However, this is a
rear-view-mirror approach to running a business because you are making decisions based
on what has already occurred A more effective—more agile—approach is to use
in-context analytics, which empowers users to make better decisions using real-time
information that they are able to gather at the point they are making the decision
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If you consider all of your KPIs ahead of time, you can make a better decision that
is in line with your requirements For example, when deciding with which vendor you should place an order, you may consider the following: “I know this vendor charges a higher price than most, but they will deliver it the next day,” or, “I know
I don’t need the part right away, so I can go with a vendor that charges less and will have it to me in a week.” If you have the most current in-context data about each vendor right at your fingertips within the operational system (your ERP tool), you can prioritize your criteria and make a smarter bottom-line decision based on what you need right now (e.g., faster delivery or lower price), and not after the fact There’s nothing wrong with using information from a data warehouse per se, but
it needs to be augmented with real-time data, which can only come from the opera-tional system, to support immediate decision making Better bottom-line decisions require information that is easily accessible from the operational standpoint in several different dimensions, such as: How many orders are in process right now? How many orders do I have with this vendor right now? If I give him more, will
I overload him and impact delivery times? This is the true value of built-in,
in-context BI
That’s not to say that historical data doesn’t have value—it always will But if in-context information is quickly and easily available to a user earlier in the value stream (i.e., at the time a decision needs to be made), users won’t hesitate to tap in to
it For example, if you are creating a purchase order, you don’t want to have to log off your ERP system and then log in to the data warehouse to execute a series of complicated queries, get your answers, then shut that down and log back in to the purchase order, only to think to ask, “What if I would have done X?” and then have
to reverse the entire process That would be very time-consuming But if you were able to drill down into the data while remaining logged in to your ERP system, and then bring that information into the equation at the time you need it, instead of looking at it afterward for the next time, it is much more efficient and can result in immediate impact to the bottom line
The ability to present this synthesized information to the user, very naturally,
at the precise point in time when it is needed, has real-time potential to improve business outcomes And that’s the difference between in-context BI and traditional
BI, which is always, by its nature, based on what happened in the past
Built-in BI is about using the info you already have to make better decisions, which is why you buy an ERP solution and use in-context analytics But the criteria are usually quite basic: Can you process orders, calculate commissions, etc., which
is important and where the payback is However, the real business benefit from in-context analytics is having a smarter organization that can make better decisions faster to keep up with the changing competitive landscape
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CONCLUSION
If a business is going to successfully operate competitively, it needs to expand its
analytics processes beyond the rear-view mirror In-context analytics derived from
both historical information and real-time data provide more accurate and intuitively
structured intelligence Accessing this information through a built-in BI tool within
an ERP environment enhances the process and empowers users to improve business
outcomes in real time
Rick Veague is Chief Technology Officer with IFS North America, and is based in the Itasca, Ill
headquarters In this role, Rick works with leading IFS customers and prospects with a focus
on enterprise asset management, field service and complex manufacturing solutions leveraging
service-oriented architecture and cloud computing Rick joined IFS in 1999, and has held
various pre- and post-sales positions developing, marketing and delivering high-value business
applications including ERP, EAM and MRO solutions He holds a degree in Computer Science
and Mathematics from Knox College.
Built-in business intelligence empowers users to drill down to the underlying data to create in-context analytics that can
help them make smarter real-time business decisions.
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www.IFSWORLD.com
management (EAM), and enterprise service management (ESM)
Founded in 1983, IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) with over 2,600
employees IFS supports more than 2,200 customers worldwide from
local offices and through partners in more than 60 countries.
For more information about IFS, visit www.IFSWORLD.com
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