The Importance of a Digital Data Warehouse and How ERP Serves as the Ideal Solution

When you think about your business’s most valuable assets, your staff, equipment, inventory and brand reputation probably come to mind first. But it’s critical to understand that, in today’s increasingly fast-paced and information-driven world, your organization’s data is just as crucial to success as any of those other resources.

That’s why it’s of utmost importance that you leverage a dedicated platform for collecting and maintaining your facts and figures. And with traceability regulations around the world growing more demanding and supply chains becoming more complex, you can’t stop there—you truly need a comprehensive “data warehouse” so that you can track and trace materials and finished goods both backward and forward, from supplier to destination.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the rationale behind making the jump to a new system for data management, the reasons to choose an enterprise resource planning (ERP) data warehouse for optimal results, and how a complementary business intelligence (BI) solution can help you refine and improve your strategy going forward.

Why You Need a Digital, Purpose-Built Data Warehouse Solution

Paper-based record-keeping methods, legacy systems and in-house solutions all fall short when it comes to meeting the data warehousing needs of today’s businesses. A few of the pitfalls of these suboptimal options are:

• Inaccuracies due to human error or miscommunication

• Ongoing investment required for updates to hardware and software

• Rapid onset of obsolescence due to technology’s high rate of change

• Lack of automations leading to inefficiencies

• Delays in reporting resulting in out-of-date information

• Unreliable analytics and visualizations resulting from compromised data

While purchasing and implementing a new platform represents investments of time, effort and money, the liabilities you face without one are significant, and the advantages of putting one in place are myriad.

ERP systems, in particular, have been embraced as the go-to technology for this purpose, they provide both supply chain data warehousing capabilities as well as a host of other powerful features for your company’s various departments and key processes.

Key Advantages of Using an ERP for Data Warehousing

ERP software that is designed specifically for your industry can act as a “single source of truth.” That’s something that many businesses struggle to create due to information siloes and manually created spreadsheets, but it’s vital for making informed decisions with agility and confidence.

Using an ERP data warehouse can provide your organization with the following benefits:

• Strong warehouse control functions “out of the box”

• Fully configurable backend that offers flexibility for your custom parameters

• Excellent usability and accessibility with a streamlined and simplified interface

• Fully scalable digital architecture to accommodate future growth

• Robust built-in analytics features that yield actionable insights

• Additional features covering a wide variety of operational areas

Specialized ERP come with tools tailored to your challenges. For example, an advanced food ERP would include dedicated modules for recipe management, material requirements planning, quality assurance, traceability and other critical matters. Meanwhile, an ERP designed for consumer goods distributors offers inventory management features, chargeback management functions and built-in electronic data interchange (EDI).

In this way, such a system can act not only as your data warehouse, but an all-in-one platform for all your key processes and considerations.

Complementing Your Strategy with BI

To get the absolute most out of your information, you’ll want to turn to a business intelligence (BI) solution that can integrate with your ERP. By harnessing the power of historical figures as well as current trends, BI can create dependable projections of demand and sales in the future.

BI applications can also apply machine learning to demonstrate how you can improve results for your various key performance indicators (KPIs). By exploring the relationships and correlations between the various metrics provided by your ERP data warehouse, you’ll gain a greater understanding of how to realize the outcomes you’re looking for.

By coupling BI with ERP, your company can take the steps necessary to become a truly data-driven organization. When you’re able to rely on facts and figures for your decision-making, you’ll more consistently see the results you want and will know what it takes to deliver on mission-critical goals.

An ERP Data Warehouse Done Better

When your company just setting out on their digital transformation journey, the number of different ERP products on the market can be daunting. Getting a firm grasp of which will suit your business best for data warehousing can be a complicated matter, as many vendors claim that their solutions can cover the basics, but it’s in the sector-specific features and additional benefits offered by the provider that the real differences are made.

At Aptean, we live and breathe the industries we serve, so we have in-depth knowledge of best practices and are familiar with the challenges that specialized companies face. We want our clients to be fully equipped for whatever comes their way, so we’ve included functions tailored to the highly specialized tasks you must accomplish.

Finally, consider that we offer flexible cloud deployments of our solution for the ultimate lightweight and highly accessible platform. Our dedicated IT teams guarantee an uptime of 99.9% or better, and there’s substantially less up-front cost with this option considering there’s no need to purchase new hardware.

If you’re interested in learning more about Aptean’s industry-specific ERP offerings and how our solution can act as the data warehouse you need, feel free to reach out to us today. You can even schedule a personalized demo to see the system in action.