ERP Business Intelligence

The term Business Intelligence (BI) was first popularised by Howard Dresner of the Gartner Group in 1989 to describe a category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data to help business users communicate better, to formulate clearer strategies for implementing change and business improvements and to aid more effective decision-making.

BI used to be the domain of specialised statisticians and corporate analysts. Now, however, with the advent of the digital enterprise and the commoditisation and proliferation of BI functionality, BI has spread to all parts and functions of the business as companies strive to put critical data into the hands of any business users who need it to do their jobs more effectively. This is evidenced by the significant growth in the BI software market which is anticipated to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 12.5% from £2bn in 2006 (software licence expenditure) to £4bn by 2012 (Source: Datamonitor).

By extracting and presenting information in a meaningful way, BI aims to eliminate the guesswork and ignorance that comes from leveraging the mountains of data which organisations collect every day in a variety of corporate applications.

At the tactical level, BI can help organisations optimise their business processes by identifying what trends, anomalies, and behaviours need management action.

At the strategic level, BI can provide significantly more business value by aligning multiple business processes with strategic business objectives through integrated performance management and analysis.

In today’s climate of increased global competition, lower barriers to entry, sustained pressure on profit margins, the ability to cut through the vast volumes of data and quickly access, evaluate and act on critical data in a timely manner, can be the defining advantage for an organisation. BI software, in particular strong reporting tools, endows businesses with this ability to act faster and more effectively than the competition and provides them with the means to successfully manage stakeholder relationships in the long run.

It is no wonder then that BI software is on the top of most companies’ ERP shopping list. We see the demand driven by a number of factors, including:

• more technically-literate departmental managers and decision-makers
• the ability of modern BI software to generate a single version of the truth at a meta-data level across all of the individual sources of data
• by software vendors’ emphasis on making BI software more self-serving with intuitive user-interfaces, roles-based dashboards, wizards, custom reports, standard templates, as well as user-friendly data extraction, analytical and publication tools
• reduced IT complexity making for less reliance on an IT provider/department, thereby reducing IT costs for BI projects (a key consideration for mid-market companies)

Mid-market companies recognise that BI can deliver hugely on performance benefits and achieve a dramatic return on investment (one analyst house estimates the return at 430%).

Microsoft Dynamics ERP (GP) and CRM software engage BI tools to output the right information to decision makers at the right time, from the chief executive down to the finance, operations, sales and marketing managers. Visit the Dynamics GP BI and Dynamics CRM SQL Reporting sections for more specific information.