It’s true that the only constant is change. Once upon a time, it was revolutionary and new for an organization to have implemented an ERP system for harnessing all their data. But over time, we’ve all discovered that data alone is not the answer—or at least not a complete answer. Data needs to be organized in order to understand what it’s telling you. You need analytics. 

Data analytics is what lets you visualize and interpret your data in order to uncover valuable insights and informed decision-making. With analytics, you can identify patterns, trends, and correlations that can help drive growth and improve efficiency. And if there’s one thing we can all get behind in the new year, it’s efficiency. So let’s take a look at how putting ERP data and analytics together can make you even more efficient in 2024.

The Role of ERP Data Analytics

First, it helps to fully understand the role of ERP data analytics in business. Now when businesses implement an ERP system, they want more than just a large data repository. They want business value, such as insight and growth. They want to find new sales opportunities and build operational efficiency while cutting any unnecessary costs from daily operations. Basically, they want to use ERP data to be proactive. And that’s what ERP data analytics delivers. 

With analytics, decision-makers can see granular data on individual business processes, along with big-picture visualizations of operations, effectively spinning their data into gold. 

The Tools You Can Use

Analytics is comprised of multiple tools that work together to give a specific and enriched context to data. These tools are what help businesses find the value within the overwhelming volume of data created by and stored in their ERPs. 

Data Mining
Like digging for gems, data mining digs out and analyzes ERP data to find any hidden information that can be used. Data mining could be used to identify the most popular products or services, who the most reliable suppliers are, even the most efficient production process. The main goal is uncovering insights that drive business value.

Performance Metrics
Using performance metrics lets an organization see how their current data compares with historical data to see where there is progress . . . and where there is not. This tells the org where to stay the course and where to make changes. Performance metrics are typically found on business intelligence dashboards. 

Reporting
Reporting is all about bringing context to your ERP data so that any department can digest it, no matter how data-savvy the individual is. It’s not just a raw data summary though: ERP data analytics reporting shows up as charts, graphs, and visualizations that help the report consumer solve problems and find new opportunities. 

Descriptive Analytics
This is actually the most basic (and common) form of analytics. Descriptive analytics uses basic mathematical operations to summarize and highlight patterns in both past and present data to help decision-makers with choices about the future. A good example of descriptive analytics could be comparing quarterly sales figures.

Statistical Analysis
This is the next step past descriptive analytics, taking statistical techniques like regression analysis and hypothesis testing to find patterns and relationships for enabling data-driven decisions. Statistical analysis gives the business a deeper look into ERP data to understand what’s behind current performance and roadblocks. 

Analytics also includes the processes that ready data for the above analysis, ranging from data querying to data preparation. All of this works together to produce the data analytics that reveal the insights needed to run the business.

Data + Analytics = Efficiency

The truth of it is that the most successful companies are the ones putting insights into the hands of their teams. Which means that ERP data analytics are paramount for success: Data analytics boost efficiency by providing the information needed to make the right decisions at the right time. From the vast amount of ERP data available, analytics let you analyze historical trends, customer behavior, and market dynamics. 

Data analytics is more than a buzzword. It’s a necessity for improving the way your organization operates. Technology will only continue to advance, and data analytics will become more and more integral to success. For the most efficient analysis, set clear goals. A clear business intent guides analysts to focus on the most pertinent data using relevant tools and methods, and keeps them from wasting time and resources on extraneous data.

Build Efficiency with the Help of CloudExtend

You can help drive further efficiency with ERP data analytics by putting the right tools in your teams’ hands. What does it take to parse through data to make sure the answer to your problem is actually contained in the data on hand? The required output for analysis might be possible, but if it’s manual and time-consuming to create too, the net efficiency gained might be nil. 

We believe wholeheartedly in efficiency and finding the easiest and best way to get something done. That’s why CloudExtend builds integrations between NetSuite and Excel to pull the right data in for analysis through saved searches, enable users to work with it in Excel and refresh it automatically or on demand, and even upload data back into NetSuite via Excel, bypassing the CSV upload process for an extra kick of efficiency. 

According to one data expert, most bad corporate decisions and wasted worker time can be tracked back to bad data—be that ungoverned, mismanaged, or low-quality data. Leveraging CloudExtend Excel for NetSuite lets you pull only the right data into your spreadsheets for analysis, while also letting you run corrections back up from Excel so you can be confident your data is also accurate and trustworthy. 

In short, we built CloudExtend apps so you can be more efficient with your ERP data and analytics, and more successful in your business. Let us show you how we do it with a FREE fourteen-day trial.