The Biggest Mistake That Companies Should Avoid With Analytics Over Their ERP Integrated System

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Data and Analytics (D&A) is considered a backbone of any organization; above all, it is the support of a company’s decision-making process, the information that C-Level Executives use to make decisions; beyond that, every Board of Directors meeting requires KPIs & Metrics, Financial Outlook, Monthly Report, and those are the most common data-insights.

Some people may think that real-time technology like a S/4HANA Embedded or Dynamics 360 replication to Azure SQL would cut back a D&A project, but I would say that it could be a double-edged sword; let me straighten this out:

Let’s talk about the positive sides

• Operational reporting: in many cases, a significant portion of reporting requirements can easily be covered directly by that technology.

• Operational data is accessed in real-time

• The journey of data: data from tables can be displayed on a fancy Fiori page (S/4HANA), or in MS Excel using JetReports for Dynamics 360, without any transformation.

When this kind of operational data platform is a mistake for analytics?

• If you need historical data. When you implement a new ERP system, only master data and opening balances could be moved to the new system. In many cases, you will need historical data for analytics.

• If you need a mix of historical data and legacy data. One must be able to accumulate data to institute meaningful measures for insight, and with embedded operational reporting, you won’t get that.

• If the organization has different BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, SAP Analytics Cloud), and there are so many users trying to get data from the ERP

• If your company needs an ERP license per each user that data from BI.

• If you could affect the performance of the production system with reporting that required compute-intensive workloads or a huge number of users.

• If your company has other source systems, and you are supposed to integrate this data, you can’t do that with Embedded Operational Reporting.

Companies always have the budget in mind, to cut costs they often consider Embedded Operational Reporting and skip a data-platform project, but to be honest I have to say the limitation of this solution. If you replicate tables from the ERP database to another database for reporting purposes, this is an operational reporting solution toward to relational database model, not a data warehouse for BI.

A normalized database model doesn’t work for Analytics, in terms that it required a lot of joins to perform a query. The performance of the BI solution is going to be affected when you need to analyze several periods in a chart or if you need to make insights, KPIs, and blend different sources in the same fancy tiles.

Somes CIOs are completely engrossed with their day-to-day functions, and don’t prioritize the data-strategy journey; when problems come up, they ask for a solution ASAP and implement a “Band-Aid” for a lack of a modern data platform.

I would say that this is like construction, the primary purpose of a building foundation system is to hold the construction up, without it, the construction would quickly fall. A properly built foundation will keep it strong.

In D&A a bad foundation could affect all that you develop over it and end up in a bad experience for consumers.

If you don’t have the expertise of engineers and architects who set up the building foundation plan with the design patterns, your building could fall, and the company ends up in a loss of investment.

Rethinking Your Data Strategy

Many organizations struggle with data, collecting large amounts of disparate and diverse data, integrating data from different systems, keeping the quality and reliability, delivering data to users, enabling data-driven insights with BI tools to users, and most importantly understanding what the data means.

Let’s look at a survey’s result made by “CIO Insight” to several CIOs around the USA:

• 58% said their company struggles to evaluate data quality and reliability.

• 14% said they have the talent and capabilities required in D&A

• 16% said their organization takes advantage of D&A of predicting future trends.

• 86% said that the biggest current advantage of D&A is faster business decisions.

• 80% said that the biggest current advantage of D&A is more accurate business decisions.

• 81% of survey participants said their company has improved its understanding of customers through D&A

• 50% said they've increased sales thanks to these tools.

“Generating long-term value from data requires that organizations continue to move toward a robust, enterprise-wide data and analytics strategy”.

y CIOinsight

To Bear in Mind

Selecting the most suitable analytics solution is one of the critical decisions that enterprises need to make in their digital transformation journey, I can assure with a modern data platform you are building the foundation to ground up and enrich their data & analytics knowledge, for improving the decision-making process, and getting a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

How do you move forward?

Data Warehouse and data lake solutions are constantly evolving to support modern analytics, including self-service and machine learning. How build that modern data architecture? How to turn complexity into simplicity? what should be the key components of the data architecture? Which BI tool will be suitable and affordable for the company?

There are different solutions, many ways, and best practices to keep in mind, as well as to make that happen; the most important thing is:

Shifting the strategy from operational reporting to a modern data warehouse & analytics journey that lever the decision-making process up.

To sum up, it’s not just one thing that leads to becoming a data-driven company, it’s a combination of things, and to achieve this goal companies need to draw upon all our expertise as D&A Consultants, we can assist you with the right-fit solution for your organization and ensure that you have the more effective components of your data architecture.