About the author: Kevin Clarke is sales director at Afresh Consult.

The typical enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution of today has matured to such an extent that most come with some form of analytics built in. But does that constitute business intelligence?

Not necessarily; ‘true’ BI achieves considerably more than the relatively low-level analysis typical of built-in solutions.

Here’s why:

Analytics integrated with ERP doesn’t compare to a fully-fledged BI solution; from a technological point of view, these tools tend to run outside of memory (that is, on historical data) and cannot achieve the same level of performance as dedicated BI. The higher level of product development of a standalone solution also means more in terms of capabilities, features and performance.

Probably even more important than features and capabilities is the accessibility of the solution to the people who use it. Change management is recognised as one of the major challenges in the implementation of any new product or solution. By making BI not only easy to use, but demonstrably beneficial to the productivity of those who use it, best-of-breed solutions are pushing away the barriers to adoption. Specifically, a good BI solution will allow for a lot of work to be done in a familiar environment – and what could be more familiar than the much loved, but limited, spreadsheet?
Does this mean BI should be somehow separate from the ERP solution? By absolutely no means.

Indeed, it is the very maturity of ERP that makes today’s purpose-designed BI far more capable and far more powerful than ever before. Together with a lot more information, which is contained in the ERP solution, there is also workflow, which interconnects applications, adding further context to information.

With maturity comes affordability, too. It takes less time and much less money today to implement an advanced, purpose-built BI solution than it did 10 years ago. Combined with appropriate organisational maturity, true BI goes further, finding new patterns, identifying new opportunities and insights. It informs new ways of thinking about the business and its direction. BI really is ready for the masses.