How much do you know about your business? Are you able to create the reports you need to move forward with business decisions, develop new business goals, and identify business challenges? Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software contains extensive reporting capabilities to help guide your business. While you probably already utilize many of these capabilities in your current ERP system to create business-critical reports for upper management and executives, are you using the intelligent reporting features to analyze your business and create a plan for future improvement?
Business reporting involves much more than creating the necessary monthly, quarterly and yearly financial statements and reports. In order to stay informed about current business activities and identify potential challenges before they arise, companies need access to reports and data on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This access to business-critical information can then help companies manage their operations more effectively, respond faster to customer inquiries, and make better decisions overall. In a word, we’d call this intelligent business management.
Striving for Business Intelligence
Modern day ERP solutions contain many features and tools designed to improve business reporting and analysis, the most popular being business intelligence. Business intelligence tools can help businesses analyze and report on a wide-variety of data, from financial information to customer service measurements to the efficiency of manufacturing processes. Most businesses have all the data and information they need; they just are not utilizing the right tools to access it.
With business intelligence, businesses have access to real-time information into every area of the business, helping them to be more proactive about improving business performance and monitoring financials. Companies utilizing business intelligence have access to real-time dashboards and instant reports that can be easily customized to include however much or little information they’d like. In addition, companies can drill down into any area of the business and uncover key inefficiencies hindering business performance.
As we mentioned above, most ERP software solutions include business intelligence features to ensure intelligent reporting. By working with your ERP solution (and other business management applications), business intelligence pulls all of the information you need into a central database to make it easier to analyze and report on information across your business. When you utilize business intelligence tools, you:
- Automate your reporting processes, cutting the time it takes to create and review reports
- Make better decisions
- Gain better control over your business and financial reporting
For more information about how you can use business intelligence to uncover important facts about your business, contact us today.