Business Intelligence And Enterprise Resource Planning

As a result of technological advancements, modern businesses seek new and improved methods of conducting their business processes. Systems have been designed to augment and manage core business functions such as production, accounting, procurement, and human resources. However, even with these systems in place, information is unreliable and inconsistent if they are on disparate platforms. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software tackles this problem by integrating business processes into a centralized system.

Enterprise Resource Programming, or similar systems, have become a major part of a company’s tool set. Because of the fast pace of today’s society, the business environment has to struggle continuously in order to keep up. ERP enables companies to accomplish that by creating a “one stop shop” for all of the company’s vital information. This gives a business the ability to streamline the process of getting the item in question from the factory to the customer as quickly as possible.

Business Intelligence can be defined as the combined form of developing and learning the data that has been collected from various sources and then analyzing it. Business Intelligence is also used to provide the data in an interactive access to the data which enables the business analysts to process out certain analysis by making necessary manipulations in the data. The data that gets manipulated and analyzed includes the historical data along with the current data along with the performance levels and the situations through which the analysts are able to make precious insights that can be used to provide solutions that can result in benefitting the organization. Thus, Business Intelligence is basically taking actions based on the decisions that are taken by considering the transformed or the manipulated data (Turban, Sharda, Delen, King, & Aronson, 2011, p. 08)

This paper illustrates the concept of Business Intelligence as a stored knowledge of the company that can be developed and organized for better and effective decision making process. It synthesizes the concept of business intelligence and introduces the BI information system software that can harness all the needed information and data for decision makers. This process is placed in the context of mid size companies in Saudi Arabia for them to gain competitive advantage.

Integrating ERP and CRM systems with eCommerce operations is at the heart of creating a world-class B2B platform, and these integrations also generate some attractive side benefits such as the ability to gather business intelligence. Regardless of whether companies process that intelligence with self-service or specialized BI analytics software, the right ERP and CRM integrations are essential to the processes of mining data, connecting securely with third-party intelligence resources and predicting and responding to customer behavior. Gathering business intelligence from existing operations is one of the best ways to foster competitive advantages by generating real-time, actionable insights that proactively guide customers to a sale while preventing them from abandoning the website. About 57 percent of shoppers will abandon a website after three seconds unless they find a reason to stay, so getting real-time BI is crucial for refining content to maximize impact and answer tough questions from busy product researchers.[1]

MIS can play a huge role in efficiently supporting the same model, of decision–making support. Many organizations opt for the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to “collect, store, manage, and interpret data from many business activities” (Wang, 2014, p. 2). Enterprise resource planning systems are an integrated network of software applications that can reveal information to various departments throughout an

Business intelligence is a collection of theories, procedures, and arrangements that turn raw data into meaningful and applicable information for business objectives. Business Intelligence can handle vast amounts of unstructured, semi-structured as well as structured data to help recognize, develop and generate new opportunities. In a simple phrase, business intelligence makes interpreting voluminous data amiable. Exploiting new opportunities and carrying out effective strategies can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.

Enterprise Resource Planning is a system packaged business software system that allows an organisation to automate and integrate the majority of its business processes, share common data and practices across the entire organisation and produces and access information in a real time environment.

Business intelligence can provide companies with accurate data that can be analyzed to support business strategy therefore enabling companies to better predict effectiveness of their business goals and ultimately result in a business profit. “Business intelligence is already in use in many organizations today, by finance departments to analyze financial performance, sales and marketing to identify customer trends, and operations to enhance the efficiency of supply chains. Using real data helps them answer who, what, where, why and when of related performance” (Rylander,2009).

Enterprise Resource Planning is one of the biggest breakthroughs in the field of information technology and business. Integration of business processes through usage of centralized connected information systems gave the impression of solving the most crucial of all the business problems. They were deemed to assist the management in taking crucial decisions related to the sustainable future of the organization. At the same time, it was also expected that this system would result in elimination of human errors of omission and commission completely from the business environment. However, the corporate world saw a completely different picture of the things in the past few years. There were a number

According to Sauter (2010), business intelligence is defined as a goal, information is provided to decision makers in a timely manner to solve organizational problems or to act on opportunities for the organization. The business intelligence system aids decision makers in better understanding problems through data. Business intelligence has become necessary due to globalization and the rate of speed in which business is conducted today, 24/7. Information alone, is not business intelligent. The information must be “intelligent” (p. 56). Intelligent information is information that is important to the organization and aligns with the organization 's goal (Sauter, 2010).

complicated. It is a major mutual concern for all business and IT sector companies to change the existing situation of "mass data, poor knowledge" and support better business decision-making and help enterprises increase profits and market share. Business intelligence technologies have emerged at such challenging times. Business today has compelled the enterprises to run different but coexisting information systems.

Business Intelligence solutions provide analytics that are customized to your organization’s specific business rules. In contrast, standard reports bundled with ERP tools fail to provide such information without extensive customization.

What is ERP? ERP is short for enterprise resource planning and it is a business process management software that allows an organization to use a system of integrated applications to manage the business and automate many back office functions related to technology, services and human resources. ERP software integrates all facets of an operation, including product planning, development, manufacturing, sales and marketing. (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/ERP.html)

Business intelligence (BI) is defined as the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. BI has been around long before computers and access to the internet. For example, an old ship building yard would have to keep track of its various transactions, employees, profit, suppliers, materials, etc. The shipyard owner would then turn this collected raw data into useful information in order to figure out where the company is going wrong and where it can improve. If the suppliers have not shipped on time for weeks the shipyard would know to find more reliable suppliers - this is a very simple example of utilizing business intelligence. In