Role of Business Intelligence in ERP

ERP solutions have become the cornerstone for making data acquisition and related operations more efficient. But as most enterprises come to learn quickly, simply having an ERP solution installed is not much use. The need of the hour is to leverage business intelligence tools to make the data work.

Here are the reasons why business intelligence plays an important role in ERP:

• Data warehousing: Even a reasonably sized ERP solution tends to generate tremendous amounts of data on a daily basis. And if this data is not tagged and processed alongside, you end with a huge data store that is of limited practical use. This calls for more proactive data warehousing, which comes under the domain of business intelligence.
• Legacy data: Another vital aspect of an enterprise is the legacy data, which is data left over from previous software or processes. While companies know the importance of legacy data, they are usually at a loss when it comes to gleaning insights from it. Once again, it is only through business intelligence tools that a correct analysis can be made.
• Guesswork elimination: With the right BI tools in place, companies no more have to work on “gut feeling” for important strategy decisions. Business intelligence provides the capability to mine correct information from the data, and interpret relevant trends and patterns.

There is no wonder that business intelligence happens to be the most in-demand technology for enterprises year after year. As such, ERP forms the perfect synergy for applying BI techniques and taking better decisions.