YOUR ERP PROJECT S MISSING LINK: 7 REASONS YOU NEED BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE NOW

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1 YOUR ERP PROJECT S MISSING LINK: 7 REASONS YOU NEED BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE NOW

2 THERE S NO GOOD REASON TO WAIT Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technology is incredibly useful to growing organizations, but it comes with a complex, resource-intensive deployment and configuration process. And the time and energy spent getting an ERP system up to speed is one of the chief reasons companies hesitate to incorporate Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI & analytics) solutions. That shouldn t be the case. BI and analytics platforms help businesses get more out of their ERP solution and they dramatically reduce the time to ROI for the ERP system. With the increasing adoption of ERP solutions, businesses are discovering the usefulness of analytics and reporting in their day-today operations and decision-making. And increasingly, businesses are recognizing the value of BI and analytics platforms in creating those analyses and reports. But too many organizations opt to delay the deployment of a BI and analytics solution until after their new ERP solution is in place. That can take months or years, and it slows down the return on investment for both solutions. There s no good reason to wait. Add BI and analytics to your environment now, before you install or upgrade your ERP solution, and you ll see faster benefits from both technologies. 2

3 THE TOP THREE REASONS TO DEPLOY BI AND ANALYTICS WITH A NEW ERP 01 It s easier to use your legacy data with a data warehouse (BI and analytics) than it is to convert it to the new ERP. ERPs, for all their usefulness, have fairly strict rules and logic around how data is structured and contained. If data that the organization generated before deploying the ERP doesn t meet those requirements, it could create data quality issues down the road. Instead, the creation of a data warehouse (in the context of a new BI and analytics solution) allows a company to relocate its legacy data into the warehouse database in its native format. The BI and analytics software can merge that legacy data with the data generated by the new ERP and produce consistent analyses and reports without any conversions needed. BI and analytics tools allow data to stay in its native format. 3

4 02 Data quality control is easier with a BI and analytics solution. In a similar vein to the previous point, using a BI and analytics tool allows for easier data quality control because organizations don t have to work exclusively within the constraints of the ERP s fields. Everybody who creates records (sales, support, supply chain) within the organization is going to develop his or her own data entry habits, predicated in large part on the system in which they re being entered. There s a learning curve with any new technology, and newly created or newly updated data that s set into the new ERP may not perfectly mesh with the habits that employees have created over time. That can create discrepancies between old and new records, and duplicates cause problems. The trouble is that trying to correct these discrepancies and duplicates through an ERP system is a painstakingly slow process. Most ERPs allow only for record-by-record examination, rather than overviews for quick insight into which records are faulty. BI and analytics solutions offer that very overview, dramatically reducing the amount of time needed to smooth out the wrinkles from deploying a new data entry process. Some BI and analytics solutions go so far as to offer proactive alerting for potential data quality issues. Rather than wait and make corrections months down the road, organizations can respond real-time to problems with data. 4

5 03 Get return on your ERP investment faster with an investment in BI and analytics. For the executive team, the most important goal of an ERP deployment is information. Execs want to see the data behind their business that helps them make the big decisions every day. But getting that data out of an entirely new solution is a challenge. If a business is accustomed to producing reports from individual applications, recreating those reports in the ERP can take eons. It could be two years before an organization is back at the level they were at before the ERP era began. Businesses can t wait that long to get their money s worth, but with a data warehouse and BI and analytics, they don t have to. Create analyses that incorporate legacy data stored in the warehouse and new data from the ERP, and the business is ready to go right from the outset. BI and analytics can save new ERP users untold amounts of time and energy in working with a new technology, and it can give the organization a much faster road to ROI than they might otherwise have had without the data amalgamation tools BI and analytics offers. Deploying the two technologies simultaneously gives businesses major benefits. 5

6 THE TOP FOUR REASONS TO DEPLOY BI AND ANALYTICS WITH AN ERP UPGRADE But not all businesses are coming from a no-erp position. Many businesses have an ERP in place, but are reluctant to integrate BI and analytics due to an upcoming upgrade to their ERP solution. They mustn t upgrade time is the best time to install BI and analytics. In similar ways to how BI and analytics can save time and resources for new ERP deployments, BI and analytics can make the upgrade process smoother and get businesses back on track faster. 6

7 01 Sunset your old ERP system earlier and save money. Rather than waiting for the new ERP to be up and fully running before cutting bait on the old software, deploy a BI and analytics platform to capture the data originally kept in the old ERP solution and eliminate the old version sooner. Save the licensing and maintenance costs associated with running two ERP solutions concurrently. 02 Customize the new ERP solution less. There s a recent trend to move away from customizations to complex software suites like ERP, due largely to the hassle of maintaining the customizations through upgrades and patches. But businesses that have used an ERP solution for a while may have a heavily-customized system with years of data. The customizations that were needed to make data fit into the old ERP aren t necessary in the context of a data warehouse. Rather than struggling to recreate those customizations in the new ERP, businesses can deploy the new system as quickly as possible and relocate the old ERP s data into a data warehouse and point it to the BI and analytics tool. It gets a business from the old system to the newer one faster without sacrificing the customizations on the old data. 7

8 03 Don t recreate old analyses and reports. It can take one full working day to recreate a report in a new ERP system during the migration to a new one. One day per report isn t too bad if a business has only a couple dozen regular reports to keep track of, but organizations can easily rack up more than 500 reports that need recreation in the new system. There s no need for a delay of that magnitude. Deploy a BI and analytics solution and create the analyses that offer the information employees need without spending years replicating what was there before. 04 Some upgrades do as much harm as good. Upgrading an ERP can bring several new features and capabilities into the organization, but some upgrades can create problems that drive IT managers up a wall. Case in point, one ERP upgrade wipes out all existing reports, leaving the organization to recreate all of them. Having a BI and analytics solution in place before the upgrade prevents that long, painful duty. BI and analytics allows businesses that are upgrading their ERPs to maintain the same level of technological expectations as they ve had all along, and can even save money for businesses. Deploying BI and analytics in conjunction with an ERP upgrade is a logical step, and it can serve an organization well to learn both new platforms at the same time, rather than separately. 8

9 Allain Bill Bøge is the IT manager at Vikan, a production and sales company that manufactures cleaning equipment for cleaning professionals. Bøge and Vikan will soon undertake an upgrade to their ERP solution (Vikan uses Microsoft Dynamics AX), and will upgrade their installation of TARGIT Decision Suite at the same time. ONE USER S STORY What prompted your decision to upgrade your ERP solution? Our current system is more than 10 years old. The technology is outdated, and we can do less with it than we used to. More and more of our other solutions can t work with the old ERP, so we decided it was time to upgrade. We want to be more up to date with our software. Upgrading now gives us the opportunity to optimize our processes and introduces more flexibility and mobility into our overall infrastructure. It s going to take more than 2,000 man-hours to perform the upgrade, and we re also working with several other new and upgraded systems at the same time (including our Workforce Management Software). We ve got to start this process soon if we re going to be ready for our target launch date. 9

10 We know our data and we know TARGIT is the way to get the most from it Allain Bill Bøge, IT manager at Vikan What prompted your decision to upgrade TARGIT at the same time that you re upgrading AX? We ve been using TARGIT for some time now, and it s critical for us to get it up and running at the same time as our new ERP install. It s not going to take as long to deploy, and I m looking forward to getting onto the latest build of the Decision Suite. I m glad for the chance to do some cleaning up in TARGIT. I d like to get rid of several of our dimensions and measures that aren t useful to us now. And with the supercubes that are available, I could consolidate the 15+ cubes I have in operation already. We re also anticipating the chance to plug in the new WMS and our other data sources. We know our data and we know TARGIT is the way to get the most from it. 10

11 Keeping TARGIT in place when we switched to AX made it easy for our analysts to handle the change Allain Bill Bøge, IT manager at Vikan How did you use TARGIT before you deployed AX for the first time? How has TARGIT changed the way that you use your ERP solution? We had TARGIT in place with our earlier ERP solution, and over time, our use of BI and analytics expanded from collecting data solely on the shop floor to include our finance, warehouse, suppliers, and HR departments. The dimensions we programmed into the system made our earlier ERP more effective, and keeping TARGIT in place when we switched to AX made it easy for our analysts to handle the change. They didn t have to learn a new program. As we learned the ins and outs of AX, we expanded our TARGIT use to incorporate additional data that we hadn t been using for analytics before. 11

12 TARGIT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS SOFTWARE MADE FOR ACTION Gather Your (any) Data SQL, ERP, CRM Excel, External stats Google Analytics, Social media Learn From Your Data Dashboards > Analytics > Reports > In-Memory Analytics > Review your KPIs against your goals. Understand what happened, why it happened, and what s coming next. Build reports in less than one minute with one-click-to-analysis integration. Analyze the crucial data that doesn t live in your data warehouse. Share Your Data Storyboards > s > Batch report scheduling > Mobility/Web/desktop > Motivate employees by showing progress on display TVs. Improved collaboration with one-click distribution of analyses via s. Customize where your reports go and distribute them automatically. Access your data when and where you need it. Act On Your Data Alerts > Intelligent Wizard > Get a heads-up when metrics deviate and action need to be taken. Anywhere. Tell the system what you want. The BI Wizard tells you what you want to know and remembers your preferences. 12

13 ONE SOLUTION TO COVER ALL ANALYTICS AND REPORTING NEEDS TARGIT is designed for your entire organization, from the CEO who follows the key metrics, to financial workers who need accurate reports, to sales managers who need performance analytics and customer insights, to marketing who cares about the cost of leads, to IT who wants data security and smoothly integrated data processes. TARGIT has everybody covered. In fact, TARGIT is the most widely deployed solution in the market, and customers rate TARGIT higher in usability than any other solution. We believe that data should be connected and available to decision makers when and where they need it. There is always one more question to ask of the data you see, and if the answer is not immediately available you run the risk of having to act on intuition. That s why TARGIT is designed to get you from dashboards and reports to analyses with only one click. Add to that the integration tools that prepare your data for analysis in less than a day and the intelligence that lets you use natural language to ask for the report or analysis you want. TARGIT takes you from observation to action faster than any other tool on the market. Learn how TARGIT gives you the courage to act.