How to Get More Value From Your ERP System
For many organizations, the ERP system is the core of the enterprise. It is without a doubt the powerhouse of supply chain processes, allowing you to monitor supply and demand, procurement needs, and even track sales and distribution processes. But your ERP system can also help you address business questions about finance, GRC (Governance, Risk, & Compliance), plant maintenance, quality management, and much more. When an ERP application is correctly configured and accessible by the relevant users within your organization, your ERP can assist in providing the necessary information to make informed business decisions and take action.
So, why isn’t your ERP providing full value?
According to the peer-to-peer review site G2, “Only 5% of organizations use their ERP effectively to create and augment high-quality data, which is key to effective analytics and insights.” Read that again, “Only 5% of organizations use their ERP effectively to create and augment high-quality data, which is key to effective analytics and insights.”
Why is that? Typically, implementing and managing an ERP system comes with many significant challenges – including compliance concerns, integrations, user adoption, ensuring everything works well together, cyber security, and more. However, even if you overcome all of those challenges, there are other reasons why your company may be struggling to generate high-quality analytics and insights.
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ERP systems are difficult to navigate
Covering the vast amount of enterprise data from a multitude of different processes makes the storage and management of that data in an ERP system significantly complex. Enterprise data is typically not stored in a perfectly laid out, easy-to-navigate, manner. The ability to untangle the data models of most ERPs requires highly specialized skills – and, in the case of one of the most popular systems on the market, working knowledge of a language other than English.
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Making ERP data relative to the business can be even more challenging
Extracting critical data from your ERP is only the first step to truly understanding your enterprise. Next, the data needs to be translated into the types of reports that answer the precise questions your business users are asking. Doing so requires technical expertise that differs from untangling the ERP data in the first place. A developer specialized in business intelligence tools will typically take the data extraction from a business analyst and create the reports and dashboards required.
For businesses to access the insights vital to the success of critical processes, a user must request a report from IT. Fulfilling that request takes time and resources, and in the meantime, the requirements of the original request may change. Setting the entire process in motion again, leaving questions unanswered and members of the IT team working on a single project rather than adding value to the enterprise in other ways.
Simply put, you need to put actionable insights into the hands of the business users who need it without recreating the wheel with every single request (or change request.)
To do that, you need a system that:
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- Enriches data with pre-calculated business data to speed and simplify reporting
- Translates that data into plain English and maps it to your specific business data model
- Abstracts complex ERP data models for easy data extraction
- Seamlessly delivers the enriched data to the BI tool of your choice so that users can access it themselves
Magnitude Angles IS that Solution
The Magnitude Angles platform, which supports either SAP (ECC and S4/HANA) or Oracle (EBS, OCA, PeopleSoft, JDE) ERPs, frees IT resources from custom report development to provide self-service insights for quicker, more effective business decisions.
The context-rich business engine automatically interprets the specific data model of your ERP system – and will automatically adapt to any changes or customizations over time. This insight into your enterprise data provides continuous intelligence for your business that provides the additional benefit of being able to identify and correct process bottlenecks through root cause analysis and extending that real business intelligence across the enterprise.