Mid-market ERP vendor SYSPRO this week beefed up its enterprise applications suite with a second-generation business intelligence tool that is said to require no analytical expertise.
SYSPRO Analytics, which is integrated with SYSPRO's ERP application, comes with standard key performance indicators (KPIs), metric templates, multi-dimensional views and a built-in viewer. Once installed it is ready to begin analyzing operational data -- which is much different from the company's previous BI module.
"The first [BI tool] was not totally successful largely because it required the user to have a little bit of OLAP knowledge and we didn't provide a viewer," said Rene Wearne, SYSPRO's software manager in Costa Mesa, CA. "Our users tend to want a total solution. So we looked at the response we had and decided to rewrite it to produce an end-to-end solution for them."
SYSPRO Analytics leverages Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). This means it can be used as a stand-alone business analytics application or in conjunction with any Microsoft OLAP-compliant software. The beauty of the application, Wearne said. is that "it doesn't require any analytics OLAP or SQL knowledge. "It is just there for you."
According to Jacqueline Coolidge, research director at AMR Research Inc., business intelligence applications are catching on with mid-market manufacturers because they have the same complex business processes as large corporations, but smaller IT staffs. "So a pre-packaged solution is most appropriate for that environment," she said.
The BI application manages all aspects of data management from the database that comes with SYSPRO's ERP application, including extraction, loading and transformation processes. This eliminates the need for any knowledge of internal data structures, which is a plus for end users who are not necessarily IT experts or engineers.
That makes sense since the software is aimed at the line-of-business manager or executive who wants an at-a-glance view of business analytics, Wearne said. The KPIs include financial, distribution and manufacturing metrics, making it easy to get the operational snapshot required to make informed business decisions in real-time, he added.
SYSPRO sought to design a BI product that meets the needs of manufacturing management. "One of the things that the Gartner Group says is that it is important for business [people] to have information at their fingertips," Wearned said. "That is what analytics does for you -- it gives you the information and slices and dices -- in order to look at it differently."
AMR's Coolidge concurs that SYSPRO is taking the right steps with its BI initiative. "It makes sense what they are doing. They are following the model of the big boys -- Oracle has its BI with predefined metrics, SAP is doing the same thing -- so they are right on the trend of what most of the leading vendors are doing."
The addition of a more intuitive BI application rounds out the SYSPRO fully-integrated software suite that includes ERP, advanced planning and scheduling, CRM and e-commerce.