Manufacturing organizations are focusing on business performance and process efficiency improvements to increase competitiveness. With a wealth of information available in existing resources, many organizations are discovering new ways to gain insight into performance and processes.

Critical data that can provide insight into the health and activities of a company is captured in enterprise IT systems. This information, however, is often held in transactional applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems which are highly optimized to meet transactional needs. This is good news and bad news for business users looking for insightful information that will help them in decision processes or improvement initiatives. The good news is that most of the information they need is captured. The bad news is that there is a substantial usability gap, the information is not easily accessible, not in a meaningful format, and is difficult to relate across departments and organizations.

Packaged Analytics can overcome this gap with a fast, complete, and cost effective approach to delivering integrated, insightful information to business users in a useful format. Packaged Analytics solutions can provide business reporting and analytic solutions that put information at the fingertips of managers and executives to support decisions, strategies, and improvements based on a single source of information.

One of the most important assets of an organization flows through your business every day. Transactional data such as customer orders, shipments, purchase receipts, and operational statistics is captured in enterprise IT systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and Financial applications. Properly interpreted, this data offers measures of organizational efficiency and productivity. Timely access to logically organized data helps target profitable customers, streamline product delivery, reduce costs, and gain market share. In many organizations the decision makers have simplified their request to the IT department:

“We want all of our business and financial information available, at our fingertips and in a single repository so we can perform analysis and gain knowledge across all spectrums of [our] functional areas. We need visibility and transparency across departments without having to access individual databases and spreadsheets and then manually make the connections between data points and key performance indicators.”