ERP Business Intelligence
SUMMARY
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) offers tremendous opportunity to growing organizations with fully integrated financial systems, inventory, shipping, receiving, manufacturing, and more. However, the out-of-the-box reports can often leaving clients wanting by design. ERPs are streamlined for transactional records (aka - data collection), and notoriously dismal when it comes to analytical reporting.
This is evidenced by a proliferation of reporting tools available for the above average do-it-yourselfer power users. Meaning, an out-of-the-box solution offers basic reporting and all ERPs (systems of record) expect you to need a better reporting tool. These tools are just a fraction of the equation, and confusingly there's usually more to the answer, much more.
SaaS SOLUTIONS
ERP Partners SaaS Solutions (SaaS - Software-as-a-Service) are designed to leverage flexible reporting tools with a robust data model, in a datalake outside of the client's environments. Analytical Data and transactional data are two very different animals and we find a healthy respect for both is incredibly wise. We also understand the pros and cons of outsourcing your business intelligence needs.
CHALLENGES
SaaS partners know how to find ERP data which likely gets you 85% of where you need to be, but most aren't able to help you got the full distance outside of their domain of application expertise.
Client's frequently reminisce how out-of-the-box solutions are lacking depth, and hosted SaaS solutions are difficult and costly for vendors to incorporate non-ERP information.
Is a SaaS Partner solution a good or bad option?
There are always trade-offs with each opportunity. Using a partner typically requires a long-term commitment. Most vendors offer subscription models for a cheaper monthly rate than most organization could afford to build themselves.
Some initial questions to consider:
As our BI SaaS vendor, what type of support options do you offer?
Most solutions load data on a scheduled basis (or even streaming data), is monitoring, break, and fix included?
Do you track break/fix metrics?
What type of ticketing system do you utilize? And can you provide a client-facing dashboard with current status'.
...and much, more.
Taking it In-House
The flip-side of the SaaS option is to take business intelligence efforts in-house and build out a data team. In a worst case scenario, this is an army of one/jack of all trades, single point of success. In a best case scenario you change your entire company culture to data centered organization designating data champions for different domains (finance, operations, procurement, planning, inventory, supply-chain, marketing etc..) and train them to use the data an in-house team develops. This is requires a management commitment and often a job description change for many with in-depth training. We find many organizations like this idea and find pockets of real adoption.
A HYBRID SOLUTION (win-win-win)
On-Ramp Data Studios realizes one-size doesn't fit all. As organizations grow, leaders change as well as their insight requirements. New departments focus on new initiatives and flexing a fully-burden in-house data team can leave other team's struggle to keep up with management's expectations. We suggest an alternative solution tailored for each organization:
Initial development of SaaS based model designed for extensibility for multiple systems or record and non-essential ERP data (source agnostic).
Design a project program around On-Ramp experts while we co-design a transition plan as part of the project design.
Incorporate On-Ramp Monitoring ensuring expert level support is an email or phone call away.
Hire new talent from On-Ramp's vast network of data practitioners with same the skills supporting your solution and require training of all management teams.
Scheduled check-ins leveraging real-time dashboard analytics based on ITIL best-practices.
Most importantly, allow On-Ramp to build and support a solution in your organizations own-cloud environment. You have maximum flexibility and access to expert resources on-demand. Truly a win-win-win option!