The ERP system records all (or at least many) transactions that take place in your organization. With a Business Intelligence tool you analyze these transactions and this leads to extremely valuable information. As an example I take the service department, a department where the use of BI tools can bring your organization a lot of profit.
Understanding service profitability
Service organizations work with various maintenance contracts, various types of service jobs, various types of machines or objects and legion of different parts. To determine the profitability of the service department, it is not enough to review one or a few documents, but an analysis of the complete data is needed. Indeed, this answers many interesting questions, such as:
-> What type of maintenance contracts yield the most profit?
-> Are there any parts we need to replace often?
-> What repairs or service jobs are frequently performed?
-> How does the maintenance required differ by type or model?
These answers provide insight into service department profitability and help your organization optimize maintenance contracts, service agreements and warranty terms.
Customized Business Intelligence
A good BI tool helps your service staff answer all their questions in a simple way. Examples include:
- Predefined KPIs in management reports: the service manager would like to see key figures in recurring reports.
- Combining information from different systems: BI can be populated by different systems. If different ERP systems are used within a holding company by the underlying organizations, then BI can be used to perform analysis based on the data from all these underlying companies. It is even possible to supplement the BI system with Excel sheets.
- Presentation in different ways: The BI tool must provide the flexibility to present the data to the user in different ways. Often the data is in a so-called OLAP cube and can be presented in a dashboard or the familiar Excel.
- Ad hoc information: A user who needs ad hoc information should not have to turn to the IT department or the BI consultant. He or she should be able to get the right information easily. With the use of cubes, the data is already captured correctly which saves the user time and reduces the chance of misinterpretation.
René Welmerink is Application Consultant at Dysel and turns modern technology into practical and useful applications for clients.
