The Role of Business Intelligence, Analytics and Dashboards
Enterprise resource planning (ERP), on its own, is an excellent way to keep track of data, and record transactions and supply levels. Companies that find themselves dealing with so many items and products can find a great deal of success through automating all informational processes and storing them in easily accessible computer applications. An ERP implementation can make traditional processes much more efficient.
However, it is important to consider that other programs might be necessary to interpret the wealth of information that such a system can provide. Not all executives and planners are able to sift through the gigabytes of data that ERP systems collect, so business intelligence, analytics and dashboards can be useful tools that make judging an enterprise and improving its processes much more useful.
To judge the strength of business ventures and transactions, analytics look at a set of criteria and judge the ventures and transactions relative to current trends and industry standards. For instance, if a company wants to view every expenditure it has made in the past fiscal year purely by the impact it has on gross income, results can be produced which highlight all operations in this light. Other variables and givens can be used instead so that an enterprise’s work in the past can be judged accordingly. Analytics are most useful for comprehending past actions so that future ones can be run more efficiently.
Dashboards are simple gauges of how current processes are faring. A dashboard can be used to view daily output totals of certain products, as a monitor of resources and the speed at which they’re consumed or simply to see how quickly orders are being processed. Dashboards identify current or potential problems so they can be addressed quickly. These sorts of tools are also valuable so that planners can reassure themselves that prior designs are being fulfilled and that a current venture or plan is on track.
While analytics peer into the past and dashboards monitor the present, perhaps the most valuable of these tools is business intelligence for its ability to foresee future problems. Business intelligence, like analytics, can be given certain criteria that will inform its calculations. When provided with certain resource levels, product expectations and other complicated variables, business intelligence processes indicate ways that actions can be taken more efficiently. Important decisions that will impact an entire company should be checked and double-checked with business intelligence systems to ensure that they ultimately benefit an organization.
Contact us today to learn more about business intelligence options for your company.