Learn how Business Intelligence is perhaps not the panacea to a business' inquiry, reporting and consolidation needs.
The IT industry has always been keen on promoting new technologies and products that promise to change our lives and the way we work. The latest bandwagon to hit town is real time computing. A couple of reports by The Gartner Group and sure enough, all of a sudden everyone claims to have a real time product that can make a huge difference to your business.
The fact is real-time computing is important for some business applications, yet few technologies can truly address these real time requirements. One such area of importance is financial analysis and inquiry from the General Ledger.
Traditionally, ERP systems have weak inquiry and reporting tools and organizations have inevitably turned to Business Intelligence tools to address this requirement. The vast majority of these products copy the data out of the ERP system and into a data repository, from which financial inquiries are performed. This breaks the link with the original data in the ERP system and can lead to a number of business process issues. This creates an intriguing situation as to how a system which duplicates the data and gets out of sync with the ERP system, could ever possibly work real time.
However, many Business Intelligence tools vendors have not let this fundamental fact get in the way of their marketing efforts, and are falling over themselves to create a real time myth, that means different things to different people. In the context of financial reporting, real time should mean now, not some time in the future, when the data is extracted, loaded, re-consolidated and then inquired upon. If the data in the ERP system changes, this should be instantly reflected in the subsequent inquiries made against that data.
This fundamental concept lays at the heart of our Really Real Time® Inquiry Suite that makes it unique in the market. As a result, it's rapidly becoming the inquiry tool of choice for J.D. Edwards users of World and EnterpriseOne. Why not see how it can benefit your organization?
