The good news is the hard work has been done – you have implemented ERP! ERP has standardised your business processes and integrated your management functions. But has the system delivered on the promise of an enterprise view of information?
To help minimise costs, many ERP implementations fall into the trap of reducing effort in parts of the project that will not directly impact on their ability to get the new system live. Consulting days budgeted for report development are frequently targeted. Consequently, at post go-live, there are insufficient reports available to users to perform their day to day tasks. This can have detrimental effects on user buy-in and can result in the new system being perceived negatively.
This is a shame as ERP systems collect critical data points such as who your customers are, what they buy, when they buy it, etc. Yet many organisations fail to tap into this wealth of data and leave ROI (Return on Investment) on the table.
Your organisation can reap the benefits of ERP by tapping into the goldmine of data at your fingertips. Enterprise reporting can deliver benefits in a number of ways:
- By reducing the amount of time spent developing reports.
- Organisations can spend an inordinate amount of time gathering, aggregating and analysing information from different systems to provide reports to management.
- By providing improved information for decision making.
- Managers can get the reports they need that were too difficult to obtain or too expensive to access or aggregate in the past.
- By improving customer management.
- Companies can use reporting to identify customer and market trends and use that information for forecasting, planning, marketing, and promotions.
- By empowering people from all business functions e.g. Sales, Operations, Finance to develop their own reports.
- Many organisations are reliant on the IT department to provide end-users with reports. Enhanced reporting promises easier access to business data to all functional areas.
- Your ERP system may now offer a suite of out-of-box reports that were unavailable to you when the system was implemented.
- The reporting capability of ERP systems is improving all the time. Check with your ERP vendor if the system now offers a suite of standard reports that were unavailable (or less sophisticated) in the past.
So, the data is accumulating in your ERP system. Effective enterprise reporting can improve the value of your system as an information asset by making it available to a wider population of stakeholders.
This Opinion was written by Chris Monaghan, Senior IS Consultant at BSM. If you would like further information on Open Source ERP please send an e-mail to Chris Monaghan.
Chris Monaghan will respond to your query.