IFS North America recently conducted a survey of Manufacturing Business Technology readers to find out the extent that companies were adopting business intelligence programs and to what degree those programs were being integrated with their ERP solutions.
Click on the image to see the full study.
Study Results Synopsis:
According to the IFS study results, manufacturers confirmed they find great value in BI and are making strides to implement it in their decision-making processes. However, most organizations are still accessing their BI analytics using external tools that are separate from their ERP system. This process is often time-consuming and cumbersome for users and does not allow companies to reap the full benefits of BI analytics.
For manufacturing businesses, which increasingly are adopting Engineer-to-Order and Design-Build-Facilitate processes, BI is about providing users with the most current, in-context analytics so they can act on their insights in real time. But the full value of BI is realized when analytics are quickly and easily accessible from functional screens within the ERP system so that users can refine the data to help make immediate, bottom-line decisions.
Among the key findings:
- Almost half of the respondents with a BI solution are using a data warehouse to pull data from their ERP solution for BI purposes with analytic tools separate from their ERP solution.
- Roughly one third of respondents are using their ERP solution to pull data into an external BI tool for analysis. This may provide the most up-to-date information to the BI tool, but not necessarily in-context with the ERP solution.
- Of those respondents that have implemented a BI program, only a minority currently have their BI functionality built in to their ERP system.
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