Analytics Playing Greater Role in Business

07 May 2023

More ERP vendors are including analytics as a standard feature so companies are less inclined to use third-party business intelligence tools.

Are the terms enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) destined to become obsolete, replaced by something that encapsulates the two such as enterprise resource analytics? While a new term is no sure thing, these two areas are coming together so rapidly that the distinction between them is beginning to blur.

Business intelligence and analytics features are becoming more of a standard function in ERP systems. 350In the past, many ERP solutions were so customized and crafted to exact client needs that business intelligence and analytics also had to be custom and required a lot of work to develop. As a result, add-on BI tools were really only affordable for large companies. That’s been changing over the past few years, as business intelligence has become more broadly available and affordable.

In Web-based forums about ERP, business intelligence is one of the most popular trending subjects (along with document management, workflow and integration), BI gives ERP a sales edge that it might otherwise lack.

BFO are building BI/analytics in as a standard feature to provide those capabilities. As technology has advanced, it has become expected that systems will provide actual intelligent data that can be used to drive business decisions and strategy, not just numbers. This has shifted the expectation away from only viewing your finances within an ERP system to being able to dive deep into your customer characteristics, their satisfaction levels, your product data, production data and more.

With BFO customer are able to analyze relevant and related data from different business functions within a single dashboard is time-efficient and simpler than the alternative. The resulting insights allow businesses to better evaluate and improve operational efficiency, and to better predict, understand and adapt to trends in customer behavior.