Business Intelligence (BI): A powerful way to Elevate Your ERP System Data

Africa
Written By

Charl van Loggerenberg, Prophet SA

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The fresh produce supply chain is highly complex and fragmented, budgeting and forecasting based on uncertain demand and supply is immensely difficult.

Richer, more accurate and faster data exchange creates an opportunity for business and makes it easier to build connections between systems throughout the fresh produce supply chain. When realised, the value manifests as rich business intelligence solutions that represents data in accurate and narrative-based analytics, which in turn, drives data-driven decision making within your business. However, challenges remain despite the growing availability of technology.

Feedback from our clients suggest that these challenges keep them from realising valuable business insights: 

  • Lacking a clearly defined BI strategy: despite access to a wealth of quality data, business leaders still experience a severe lack of strategy behind these insights. While this is better than relying on instinct alone, without a clearly defined data-driven strategy, you are still shooting in the dark.

  • Sifting through large amounts of data in order to find an answer for a simple data-related question.

  • Lack of mobile access to data when not on the farm or office.

  • Doubting the accuracy of the information provided.

  • Lack of company-wide adoption: it’s essential to gain buy-in from all stakeholders early in the process to get everyone on the same page.

  • Analysing data from multiple systems: businesses reporting across multiple systems or data sources is a major challenge in the absence of a well-designed data warehouse. This data is often spread across a variety of different systems and software and varies across structured and unstructured sources such as ERP systems, CRMs, databases and Excel spreadsheets.

  • Poor BI functionality and interactivity: a lack of dedicated BI tools required for extracting, transforming and loading data from several sources inevitably result in increased manual effort and reduced interactivity. Often, poor processes and functionality lead to inaccuracies, inefficiencies and costly mistakes that can potentially stunt the growth of the business.

The solution to these challenges is simple: work with a team of Data Scientists that understand the fresh produce industry. Prophet Systems SA offers the following:

  • Full integration with existing Prophet and other third-party systems to deliver centralised data repositories for accurate and impactful BI reporting.

  • We take care of the setup of all your business intelligence tools, infrastructure and licensing. PowerBI is the recommended visualisation tool, however setup can be done on any other software e.g. QlikView.

  • We make use of tried-and-tested architecture for data extraction, transformation and loading from various sources to collate and translate your data into meaningful insights and information.

  • We facilitate the process of defining your key business indicators.

  • We develop best practice visualisation of data insights into digestible formats – either via BI Dashboards or other fit-for-purpose mediums.

  • We believe in partnering with our clients on a journey that eventually lead to established BI solutions aimed at predictive and prescriptive analytics.

  • Continuous support for turnkey business intelligence solutions.

  • Additional value-adds such as data culture assessments, data quality assessments and facilitating the change management process to a data-driven organisation.