Why ERP and Business Intelligence Are Both Essential?

For businesses aiming to collect and analyze data in an integrated database and share insights across accounting, operations, manufacturing, and sales departments, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an indispensable technology. However, despite ERP systems helping to streamline business processes and improve efficiency, companies also need additional technological support to maintain a competitive edge in today's market, such as real-time data analysis and insights for making informed decisions. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) comes in.

 

What is ERP?

ERP software helps automate business processes and provides a center for insight and control. Modern ERP systems unify data from departments such as finance, manufacturing, operations, sales and marketing, and Human Resources (HR) into a central database. Thanks to this central database, stakeholders can gain cross-departmental insights, analyze scenarios, perform financial planning and analysis (FP&A), identify processes for improvement, reduce data search time for users, and thereby enhance efficiency, save costs, and increase productivity.

 

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Like ERP systems, Business Intelligence (BI) software provides a comprehensive view of the business, helping leadership make data-driven business decisions. BI also plays a central role in high-level strategy and tactical response to market demands, helping businesses improve operational efficiency, focus on competitive advantages, and ultimately increase profitability. In practice, BI can help generate dashboards, reports, customer-facing IT systems, and external resources, and extract data from the central database to create a detailed and transparent view of the current state of the business. Additionally, it provides comprehensive and detailed analyses to help users improve front and back office operations. For example, if a retailer has supply chain issues, BI analysis can accurately identify operational bottlenecks and provide planning recommendations to rearrange more reliable shipping routes.

 

Seven Major Benefits of Integrating Business Intelligence (BI) into ERP Systems

In addition to transforming data into visual analyses and providing data support for decision-making across the enterprise, BI can also enhance ERP systems in several ways. Here are seven key benefits of using ERP and BI together:

1. Data Integration and Analysis

ERP systems generate a wealth of raw data, and BI can extract more value from this information. By integrating BI into the ERP system, businesses can gain in-depth data insights directly within the ERP platform.

2. Personalization

While every team in a company shares common goals, each stakeholder may also have their own data analysis requirements and needs. An ERP system integrated with BI can generate reports and dashboards tailored to the needs of each team, helping them achieve their objectives.

3. Predictive Capabilities

Historical ERP data provides insights into past performance, and BI opens the door to predictive analytics and modeling. Together, they offer a comprehensive view of the enterprise that includes the past, present, and future forecasts.

4. Real-Time Decision Making

Traditional reporting summarizes the past, but as mentioned, businesses need more forward-looking reports to stay competitive. This is where BI comes in: providing data and analysis in real-time to help accelerate the making of more informed decisions.

5. Comprehensive Insights

With BI integrated into ERP, businesses can easily assess business performance without having to switch between these two technologies. All necessary data is displayed in one interface, ready for generating concise reports, predictive modeling, or responding to specific inquiries.

6. Efficiency Improvement

Integrating BI into the ERP system supports businesses in real-time integration, organization, and analysis of large datasets from multiple sources. This speed advantage removes a significant barrier to business agility that hinders traditional systems.

7. Enhanced Reporting

BI supports teams in consolidating larger datasets for more in-depth analysis, thereby enhancing reporting capabilities and accelerating the report generation process. In addition, authorized users, regardless of their level of technical expertise, can access reports directly through intuitive dashboards.

 

Future Trends

As ERP and BI continue to evolve, these two technologies will become more intertwined. Data and analytics will play an increasingly vital role in shaping business strategies, with decision-makers seeking and relying more on real-time operational insights.

Furthermore, the combination of ERP and BI will further promote team collaboration. ERP systems can eliminate data silos between departments, while BI provides data support for decision-makers, bringing together the efforts of all parties towards a common goal, thus helping businesses accelerate the making of wiser decisions, improve business oversight, and win in competition.

 

Hitpoint Cloud is headquartered in Shanghai, with branches in Shenzhen, Beijing, Nanjing, Wuhan, and the United States. The Hitpoint Cloud team has been focusing on Oracle NetSuite products since 2009 and is a star partner of Oracle NetSuite for many years, providing cloud computing solutions for various modules including finance, distribution, project management, and e-commerce. With rich experience in the implementation, localization, secondary development, and training of Oracle NetSuite, Hitpoint Cloud supports the business operations of customers with a team of over a hundred implementers and developers, committed to enabling every customer in the cloud era to unleash potential, achieve greater success, and help enterprises "intelligently" win the future.