Mexico. The tool is essential for business development and, in the case of SMEs, resources have helped a lot to improve management.
With an increasingly challenging management in the face of a scenario in constant technological evolution, SMEs are often forced to choose between priority investments, such as balancing the budget, maintaining competitiveness, retaining their talents or working with a focus on the client.
For this reason, correctly choosing tools that facilitate day-to-day life and that make it possible to improve decision-making is a very desirable differential.
Thus, among the main resources indicated to improve the management of small and medium-sized companies is Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics. In general, the BI strategy can be defined as a set of tools, applications and infrastructure for data analysis, which enables through treatment processes, the improvement of the performance of small companies to potentiate their businesses.
This is because the mechanism allows companies to make a faster configuration of the work environment and, with the correct use of the tools, it is possible to significantly increase the Return On Investment (ROI), regardless of the sector, even in times of crisis.
Specialists from latin American PA (entity responsible for the strategic advice of companies of different sizes, with a focus on sustainable development) point out some reasons to consider BI and Analytics in SME businesses, these are:
1.- Administration facilitated by intuitive data analysis
With Business Intelligence dashboards, companies can use intuitive visual resources to demonstrate results. That is also valid for the evaluation of development and in the help of identifying business opportunities. In this way, administrators have in their hands the most relevant to make decisions, considering a first vision. From that, detailing information in deeper layers is essential.
2.- Ease of transport of stored ERP data for BI and Analytics
By creating a data storage space, coming from a new BI and analytics solution, the company can transfer the legacy data, which is registered in the previous ERP, to a data warehouse in its native format. BI and Analytics software can, therefore, combine the old data with that generated by your new ERP and produce consistent analytics and reports, without any conversion and without risk of losing history.
3.- Faster ROI from your ERP
It translates the objective of the company by implementing an ERP system, which is precisely the possibility of analyzing information from their businesses to make decisions, Business intelligence and Analytics, allows users to optimize time and energy in that process.
4.- Real-time analysis
By adopting BI as a management support tool, it is possible to monitor the performance of the company on a daily basis, making its evolution visible and preparing the company for its action proactively.
5.- Fewer customizations
A trend in the ERP market is to avoid so many software customizations since that process is a great discomfort because you must maintain customizations with updates and patches. With BI, the customizations that were needed to return the data applicable in the old ERP will not be necessary.
6.- Avoid repetitive recreation of old analyses and reports - it is delayed to recreate a report in a new ERP system
During data migration, the BI implemented in the work environment enables the creation of analyses that offer real-time information for employees, facilitating the work and not replicating old analyses.
7.- Separate the "tares from the wheat"
Some updates can do good as well as bad, as they allow the installation of new resources and functionalities. However, some can create quite inconvenient problems, such as ERP updates that all existing reports, leaving the organization the responsibility of recreating them. With the BI tool and an analytics solution, the corporation avoids that kind of stress.
