In this article, I’ll be talking about Business Intelligence, but more specifically:
- What is Business Intelligence and how does it work with ERP?
- What’s available for the NetSuite community in terms of BI & analytics solutions
- And what is BI for NetSuite for Data Visualization and Data Warehousing?
First of all, what is Business Intelligence?
Let's look at the term “business intelligence” for a moment and clear up any misconceptions before we move forward. As I wrote in another article and as I explain it to customers, Business Intelligence is not “Reporting on Steroids”. When we hear that, we’re hearing a throwaway term that has been coined by popular business culture. However, it doesn’t serve to give you a real picture of what BI actually means.
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Here is Wikipedia’s Business Intelligence definition:
“Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.”
While this definition is technically accurate, let’s simplify it and put it in context here. A business intelligence solution is meant to provide a flexible platform for the user to process, access and visualize large amounts of data from multiple systems. “Business intelligence”, in this context, is an umbrella term for the “Hard Stuff” that companies want to achieve in their business systems. These difficult activities are ultimately aimed at enabling forecasting and predictive analytics. Single systems will fall short in these complex areas, which is where companies start to look into Enterprise BI.
Why BI for NetSuite? AND How does this all work?
Let’s start with the WHY?
Very simply - ERP systems, such as Oracle NetSuite are designed to run your day to day operations. From a reporting perspective, they will deliver primarily operational reports focused on your core business activities. That being said, we know speaking to business leaders in the NetSuite community that executives need to effectively visualize all relevant business data out of their ERP. As a result, speaking with our customers, we see the more complex and strategic business reporting happening outside of the ERP platform. With this reality, we created GURUS Business Intelligence to deliver end-to-end data analytics right inside the NetSuite platform.
So, How does this all work?
On the right hand side of this diagram, we see NetSuite business information and the variety of flexible reporting options users can take advantage of. The combination of Saved Searches, Standard Reporting and SuiteAnalytics Workbooks offers excellent reporting tools within the FOUR WALLS of the NetSuite ERP platform. That being said, NetSuite reporting is limited to the data structure and reporting tools exposed to users. This means there is limited flexibility in combining data across the system, visualizing information and accessing high volume historical data (which is typically used in forecasting).