A Successful ERP Reporting Strategy
As your business grows, so does the complexity of your data. An effective ERP reporting strategy can help you make sense of it all and make better decisions for your business.
Table Of Contents
A comprehensive and ultimate ERP reporting Strategy
Here’s what you need to know to develop a successful ERP reporting strategy:
- Define your goals
- Collect the right data
- Choose the right tools
- Automate your reports
- Get the right people involved
By following these steps, you can develop a successful reporting strategy that will help you make better decisions for your business.
The ERP software market per year is more than $25 Billion, which grows 10-20% every year globally.
Creating a future-proofed ERP reporting strategy
Most businesses rely on enterprise resource planning ERP software to manage their operations. This ERP software provides a central repository for all the real-time data generated by the various business processes. In order to make informed decisions, businesses need to be able to generate accurate reports from this real-time data. However, generating accurate reports can be a challenge, especially as businesses grow and change over time. This is why it is essential to have a well-thought-out reporting strategy in place.
Sometimes, technologies are deployed without considering the high-end results and hence it becomes complicated to maintain since new requirements are developed in an inflexible work architecture. If you have ever considered the reason then it is a shortage of a complete ERP reporting strategy that indicates governing, synchronising and integrating structure to business goals.
Key Elements of a Successful Reporting Strategy
An effective reporting strategy is a key to the success of any enterprise resource planning ERP software. The right strategy will help you get the most out of your investment by providing accurate and timely information that can be used to make informed decisions.
There are a few key elements that should be included in any successful reporting strategy:
KPIs and Data Design
Reporting Governance
People & Organisation
Tools & Systems
KPIs and Data Design
Businesses today are looking for more ways to improve their operations and efficiency. One way they are doing this is by using enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems help businesses keep track of their data and resources, making it easier to manage and monitor their progress.
However, in order to make the most out of an ERP system, businesses need to have a successful reporting strategy in place. This means having the right KPIs (key performance indicators) and data design.
The first step is to identify which KPIs are most important to your business. This will vary depending on your industry and what you are trying to achieve. Once you have identified your KPIs, you need to design a data model that will help you track and measure them.
This data model should be flexible enough to accommodate future changes and growth. It should also be easy to use and understand. After all, if your ERP reporting strategy is too complicated, it will be difficult to get buy-in from employees.
Once you have your data design model in place, you need to make sure it is populated with accurate and up-to-date data. This data should be collected from all parts of the business, including sales, marketing, finance, and operations.
If you are using an ERP system, you may already have some of this data. However, it is important to verify that it is accurate and complete. Otherwise, you run the risk of making decisions based on inaccurate information.
Once you have collected all of the necessary data, you need to start analyzing it. This will help you identify trends and patterns. It will also allow you to see how different KPIs are affecting each other.
Reporting Governance
When it comes to enterprise resource planning (ERP) reporting, effective governance is essential to success. Governance ensures that everyone understands the reporting capabilities and their roles within it and that the data being reported is accurate and up-to-date. Without governance in place, ERP reporting can quickly become chaotic and ineffective.
There are a few key elements to successful ERP reporting governance. First, it is important to have a clear understanding of the data that needs to be reported and where it comes from. This data should be centrally managed and controlled to ensure its accuracy. Second, all stakeholders need to be involved in the governance process and understand their roles and responsibilities. Lastly, there needs to be a clear and concise reporting process in place that is regularly reviewed and updated as needed.
People & Organisation
With successful changes, the required outputs also change as per the performed activities to create improved results. Likely, reporting is no more a different strategy. Allowing new reporting capacities shows reduced time requirements in reconciling information while offering advanced finance operations. Hence, it is quintessential to get the effect on people and finance business.
In ERP reporting strategy, finance team executives can be requested to create insights instead of tracking past performance. As the role changes, it might result in new provisions and require advanced skills. Also, finance businesses should also get challenged to train their team members while helping them transform to strategic insight generation as well as situational modelling that brings prime and informed business decisions.
As the business starts adopting advanced reporting capabilities, it should be shifted to a consistent workplace. Also, the business would also require a reliable reporting strategy to change with the business needs. For better results, there should be a positive effect on self-service and hence finance should have an aggregated job rather than just being a reporting distributor.
Tools & Systems
After finishing the data designing part, another thing to consider is the global system as well as reporting tool structure. It involves accessing the present technology scenario (Business Intelligence) and checking different ways to increase the various tools based on vivid data and process protocols.
Then, the team executives can easily check the gaps depending upon the desired capacities in the ERP system. However, in order to check new capacities, you should be ready to get all use cases of reporting that are required as a part of your ERP reporting strategy.
Major Principles for Designing a Reporting Strategy
For companies to define reporting strategy, there are a few major principles to think of-
Truth version
Collect data from various sources and convert them into a single data platform. This would allow genuine performance throughout the common data elements set. However, common data platforms allow different hierarchies of equal data analysis to offer a basic yet practical understanding of reporting applications.
Accurate reporting
ERP reporting tools must have the reliability to carry out accurate queries while developing reports to review the analytical, management, and operational requirements. However, this will skip the consolidation of annual management reports and enhance accurate data delivery while making more time for the analysis of data.
Data consistency & governance
Support reporting and data governance standards, policies, and functions to place a regular baseline and data quality measurement along with reporting packages. Also, skip complex collection of metrics functions to generate on-time delivery and flexible performance measures.
Defined access and data architecture
Approaching common data factors/elements are required to have restrictions by security duties that make sure that users can get an accurate insight of the company data. Also, getting access to ad-hoc query tools should also have restrictions with a business requirement.
Reliable architecture
The ERP reporting program and its concerned tools should be allowed by the architecture that will leverage users across the globe in the finance company with one of its kinds of reporting needs. It will enable the development of worldwide reporting as well as technology standards through various business units, locations, and countries that will avoid complex statements.