Delivering Business Analytics: Practical Guidelines for Best Practice

Appendix

The Cheat Sheets

CASE STUDY: AUGMENTING OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are the backbone of most organizations; without them, things would fall apart. They help streamline operational activities and drive efficacy through repeatability. However, the benefits they bring through process efficiency only go so far; once processes are efficient and standard, what then?

Getting ahead of the competition requires more than efficiency. Predicting the future is better than reacting to the past, and greater insight supports better decisions. Unfortunately, most ERP systems are designed around efficiency and repeatability and are relatively lacking on the predictive side. Sometimes, this is because of technical limitations. Sometimes it’s due to implementation choices.

The key to continuous return lies in making processes smarter and the easiest way to do this is through leveraging analytics. When existing processes don’t offer these functions, it’s tempting to hard-code the smarts into the ERP system. More often than not, this is a mistake.

Hard-coding analytics into functional processes creates a number of problems, many of which are only obvious after the fact. The better approach is to generalize analytics functions and make the smarts reusable elsewhere in the organization. By developing parallel analytical processes that augment the ERP system, the organization can leverage these capabilities elsewhere in the business. This helps drive competitive ...