WP why ERP is your best BI tool

WHITE PAPER
WHY ENTERPRISE
RESOURCE PLANNING
SOFTWARE IS YOUR
BEST BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE TOOL
CONTENT
WHY COMPANIES WANT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 1
BUILT-IN MEANS BETTER ACCESSIBILITY 2
CONCLUSION 3
ABOUT IFS 4
1
WHY ERP IS YOUR BEST BI TOOL
WHY ENTERPRISE RESOURCE
PLANNING SOFTWARE IS YOUR BEST
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOL
RICK VEAGUE
IFS CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
With the explosion of Big Data in recent years, more companies are increasingly
interested in gathering the enormous amounts of information their business generates
and mining some sort of intelligence from it. Like a diamond in the rough, this
information can be analyzed to reveal a goldmine of trends, patterns, successes and
failures about their business’s processes. The idea is that they become enlightened
by this new-found intelligence and use it to develop and measure key performance
indicators (KPIs) to help them make decisions about how their business can become
more efficient and competitive in the future.
WHY COMPANIES WANT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
At its core, business intelligence (BI) is really a euphemism for, “What’s going on in
my business? Am I making money? Where am I doing well? Where do I need to
improve?” These are all good things to know. But entering orders and buying a part
(which is what enterprise resource planning (ERP) software tools help you do)

doesn’t tell you if you are ordering from the right vendor with the best price and
best on-time delivery. You must measure and track KPIs to know if the business is
doing well or not. And to calculate KPIs, you must first gather the information and
analyze it. Having intuitive analytics capabilities built into your ERP solution allows
users to easily access the right intelligence, at the right place and at the right time, to
make smarter decisions.
Many companies use data warehouses to store information from throughout their
enterprise to develop KPIs. We know that data warehouses tend to trail reality.
Information is gathered from last week, last month and last year and is then sent over
to the data warehouse, but the information stored in it always lags behind what’s
going on right now. This historical data is useful because some KPIs can only be
calculated after enough of a historical track record or view of data has accumulated
so that you can actually look back on it and do an analysis. However, this is a rear-
view-mirror approach to running a business because you are making decisions based
on what has already occurred. A more effective—more agile—approach is to use
in-context analytics, which empowers users to make better decisions using real-time
information that they are able to gather at the point they are making the decision.
2
WHY ERP IS YOUR BEST BI TOOL
BUILT-IN MEANS BETTER ACCESSIBILITY
If you consider all of your KPIs ahead of time, you can make a better decision that
is in line with your requirements. For example, when deciding with which vendor
you should place an order, you may consider the following: “I know this vendor
charges a higher price than most, but they will deliver it the next day,” or, “I know
I don’t need the part right away, so I can go with a vendor that charges less and will
have it to me in a week.” If you have the most current in-context data about each
vendor right at your fingertips within the operational system (your ERP tool), you
can prioritize your criteria and make a smarter bottom-line decision based on what
you need right now (e.g., faster delivery or lower price), and not after the fact.
There’s nothing wrong with using information from a data warehouse per se, but

it needs to be augmented with real-time data, which can only come from the opera-
tional system, to support immediate decision making. Better bottom-line decisions
require information that is easily accessible from the operational standpoint in
several different dimensions, such as: How many orders are in process right now?
How many orders do I have with this vendor right now? If I give him more, will
I overload him and impact delivery times? This is the true value of built-in,
in-context BI.
That’s not to say that historical data doesn’t have value—it always will. But if
in-context information is quickly and easily available to a user earlier in the value
stream (i.e., at the time a decision needs to be made), users won’t hesitate to tap in to
it. For example, if you are creating a purchase order, you don’t want to have to log
off your ERP system and then log in to the data warehouse to execute a series of
complicated queries, get your answers, then shut that down and log back in to the
purchase order, only to think to ask, “What if I would have done X?” and then have
to reverse the entire process. That would be very time-consuming. But if you were
able to drill down into the data while remaining logged in to your ERP system, and
then bring that information into the equation at the time you need it, instead of
looking at it afterward for the next time, it is much more efficient and can result in
immediate impact to the bottom line.
The ability to present this synthesized information to the user, very naturally,
at the precise point in time when it is needed, has real-time potential to improve
business outcomes. And that’s the difference between in-context BI and traditional
BI, which is always, by its nature, based on what happened in the past.
Built-in BI is about using the info you already have to make better decisions,
which is why you buy an ERP solution and use in-context analytics. But the criteria
are usually quite basic: Can you process orders, calculate commissions, etc., which
is important and where the payback is. However, the real business benefit from
in-context analytics is having a smarter organization that can make better decisions
faster to keep up with the changing competitive landscape.
3

WHY ERP IS YOUR BEST BI TOOL
CONCLUSION
If a business is going to successfully operate competitively, it needs to expand its
analytics processes beyond the rear-view mirror. In-context analytics derived from
both historical information and real-time data provide more accurate and intuitively
structured intelligence. Accessing this information through a built-in BI tool within
an ERP environment enhances the process and empowers users to improve business
outcomes in real time.
Rick Veague is Chief Technology Officer with IFS North America, and is based in the Itasca, Ill.
headquarters. In this role, Rick works with leading IFS customers and prospects with a focus
on enterprise asset management, field service and complex manufacturing solutions leveraging
service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. Rick joined IFS in 1999, and has held
various pre- and post-sales positions developing, marketing and delivering high-value business
applications including ERP, EAM and MRO solutions. He holds a degree in Computer Science
and Mathematics from Knox College.
Built-in business intelligence empowers users to drill down to the underlying data to create in-context analytics that can
help them make smarter real-time business decisions.
En4609-1 Production: IFS Corporate Marketing, May 2014.
www.IFSWORLD.com
THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN STATEMENTS OF POSSIBLE FUTURE FUNCTIONALITY FOR IFS’ SOFTWARE PROD-
UCTS AND TECHNOLOGY. SUCH STATEMENTS OF FUTURE FUNCTIONALITY ARE FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES
ONLY AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS ANY COMMITMENT OR REPRESENTATION. IFS AND ALL IFS PRODUCT
NA MES ARE TRADEMARKS OF IFS. THE NAMES OF ACTUAL COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS MENTIONED HEREIN MAY BE
THE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.
IFS AB ©2014
IFS is a recognized leader in providing business software to companies
that aspire to become more agile. IFS uses its deep industry-focused
expertise to help companies in targeted sectors increase agility in
three core areas: enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset
management (EAM), and enterprise service management (ESM).

Founded in 1983, IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) with over 2,600
employees. IFS supports more than 2,200 customers worldwide from
local offices and through partners in more than 60 countries.

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