Business Intelligence Reporting Risks

ERP reporting risks and DWH/BI

Its a challenging task to include existing ERP reports into independent solution for reporting and planning purposes like DWH/BI or even Financial Business Intelligence. Challenge raises as reports are more complex and are very customized.

There are more reasons to place data from ERP to DWH like:

• reports need to  support combination of financial and non financial kpis;
• faster reporting
• better data analysis functionalities
• and similar…

ERP is designed to gether data and to support simple reporting. There are reasons to migrate reports to solution that is designed for reporting like DWH. Although ERP solutions do not have dynamic solutions to report and plan with structured and non structured data. Let’s consider them for now production systems.

It is reasonable to include ERP data into DWH.

It is reasonable to include ERP data into DWH that is not from same vendor. ERP vendors have DWH solutions that are limited compared to competitors that are not originally in ERP business.

so…

It is reasonable to make effort to export data and prepare structures for reporting. Reports are much quicker, have more functionalities.

where is the catch…

Despite named reaseons it is really painfull to prepare ERP reports in DWH since their logic is complex. Especially SAP reports…  

Furthemore, DWH introduces one more step for maintenance process. Data flow consist of one step more making maintenance more difficult and more challenging.

but this is not all…

we are talking about own experiance…

What if in certain point of time during project reporting implementation happen change of priorities? 

What???

In one certain point of time ERP reporting might be overwhelmed by some higher priorities like organizational changes and implementation in ERP. For company it is essential process to run smoothly and reporting is allways second priority. Reports from ERP in DWH that are prepared are being left like orphans and are not being used because users are on other high priority projects.

This happens and it is one risk example of what could happen with reporting.

It is hard to influence and predict.

It is a dangerous risk for project and bad investment.

REPORTING TIP: Consider to make reports till end and ensure that they actually go live.

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