The importance of business intelligence to ERP strategy

At Reflex, we believe that business intelligence should always be a key element of a company’s ERP strategy, which is why we addressed the need for business intelligence functionality within our own software solution. Information access, reporting, business intelligence and Reflex Analytics™ are the common foundation across the Reflex enterprise solution portfolio, which means that not only can Reflex users pull comprehensive reports and analytics in real-time, the software’s full integration ensures data inputted from several departments is immediately accessible from the business intelligence module.

In a recent blog post by Eric Kimberling, Managing Partner at Panorama Consulting Solutions, he discusses the importance of business intelligence to ERP strategy–something that companies often overlook during their selection process. The post highlights a number of key points to consider regarding business intelligence and ERP software, such as “Business intelligence enables more significant business process reengineering.” Kimberling states that business process re-engineering must go hand-in-hand with business intelligence capabilities; it’s important for the company to understand which analytics and data will help improve overall business.

“Business intelligence provides direction to your data strategy and data migration efforts. Most organizations and their ERP consultants tend to focus on simply migrating old data from a legacy system to the new ERP system. We’ve all heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out,” so it is important to ensure that the data in the new system supports new business intelligence capabilities.” – Eric Kimberling, Panorama Consulting Solutions

With the right business intelligence strategy, companies can reduce the amount of useless information and data brought over to the new system in the data migration stage. This will help enable better access to historical sales information and thus greater insight into the business and areas of profitability.

Business intelligence tools, however, are only as good as the people using them. “If the new business intelligence tool is going to drive better customer insights, then customer service clerks and other employees touching the customer experience will need to have redefined business processes, roles and responsibilities, organizational design and accountabilities to support the new focus,” says Kimberling. “Your business intelligence initiative should be part of a greater, longer-term plan, so be sure to invest the necessary resources in organizational change management to make that transformation possible.”

Reflex Analytics™

At Reflex, we address business intelligence needs from the outset. Our built-in business intelligence and analytics module means that companies can analyze their business performance instantly. Likewise, Reflex Analytics™ is available throughout every module in the system, so users can build charts and reports at any time with the most recent data. All Reflex ERP solutions come with an integrated family of offerings for reporting, queries, dashboard views, trends and predictive analyses, as well as built-in charting and graphics capabilities.

Read the full blog post by Eric Kimberling on the Panorama Consulting website.