In today's data-centric world, the capacity to collect quick, precise, and insightful data is critical for informed strategic decision-making. ERP systems like NetSuite play a pivotal role in assisting businesses to consolidate their data and scrutinise their operations and processes.
However, these systems often grapple when it comes to analysing data coming from outside the ERP itself, creating a barrier to all-encompassing, cross-departmental decisions. Additionally, they offer basic reporting, leaving users unsupported when they need to implement strategic initiatives that drive real business value. This is where value led data platforms like Kleene.ai come into play.
A value led data platform bridges the gap between data consolidation, interpretation, and strategic actions. Not only does it provide tools to gather all your company data for bespoke business intelligence, but it also enables users to build strategic initiatives. These initiatives might include supply chain optimisation, optimised inventory, and more. This superior capacity allows businesses to effectively exploit their data.
But, let’s get into the four limitations of of ERP systems like Netsuite:
- Slow extraction of reports & inconsistent data
- No ability to blend data from other sources
- Limited dashboards and reports
- Difficult to build strategic initiatives
Slow extraction of reports & inconsistent data
NetSuite's Saved Searches is a commendable feature, but it isn’t built for comprehensive reporting. The process of pulling reports is often tedious and time-consuming, given the massive volumes of transactions and technical complexities involved.
Slow report generation can leave organisations incapable of reacting promptly to market conditions or organisational changes. As a result, decision-making is delayed and lacks consistent, up-to-date data, impacting areas such as sales and supply chain management.
Kleene.ai steps in to resolve these issues by consolidating NetSuite data with all other data sources in one place, thereby providing a single source of truth. This feature speeds up the reporting process by pre-running your queries, thereby enabling swift and easy ad-hoc reporting for analysts and business users. With the aid of interactive dashboards, sales team performance and product performance against sales targets can be quickly visualised and analysed.
No ability to blend data from other sources
While NetSuite holds a wealth of business-critical data, it's not the sole data source in an organisation. Complications arise when attempting to blend data from other sources into NetSuite. Although a solution often used is to ingest data from external sources into NetSuite, it only exacerbates reporting speed issues and leads to complex table structures.
Inability to pull comprehensive reports covering all aspects of the organisation can have major repercussions, including laborious and repetitive data blending processes that lead to less frequent reporting.
Kleene.ai's power lies in its ability to consolidate all the different data sources existing in your organisation alongside NetSuite. It refines raw data into business-ready inputs that foster superior insights, analysis, and decision-making. By integrating with your BI tool, it enables self-service with bespoke dashboards that drive business decisions.
Limited dashboards and reports
Reporting in NetSuite often involves a manual process of pulling specific data and importing it into Excel. Its internal dashboarding, while robust, has limitations in what it can display without relying on the slow extraction-based reports. It also lacks the ability to include data not housed in NetSuite.
The result is that businesses make decisions based on incomplete data and can't customise reporting to include specific business outcomes.
Kleene.ai has not only partnered with leading BI tools like PowerBI, Tableau, and Looker, but has also built dashboards that provide data from across your organisation to power sophisticated visualisations and uncover previously inaccessible insights. For instance,-among many others- it allows for in-depth product performance analysis at SKU level.
Difficult to build Strategic initiatives
A crucial area where ERPs like NetSuite often struggle is in the development and implementation of strategic initiatives. While it does provide some basic reporting, these features often fall short when businesses attempt to execute wide-ranging strategic plans. Initiatives such as supply chain optimisation, optimised inventory and pricing optimisation can become daunting tasks, as they demand extensive cross-departmental data and considerable team expertise for successful implementation and refinement.
NetSuite's limitations in data scope and depth often restrict businesses, leaving them unable to access and analyse crucial data from various departments. This lack of comprehensive data further complicates the implementation of strategic initiatives that require a holistic view of business operations. Moreover, even when the data is available, the knowledge needed to build and optimise these initiatives often demands specific expertise within the team - expertise that may not always be readily available.
This is data value platforms step in, transforming these challenges into opportunities. Platforms like Kleene.ai have been designed to overcome these hurdles effectively by constructing a unified and comprehensive data source - a 'single source of truth'. This consolidated data pool takes into account information from all areas of a business, providing a complete, holistic view that enables better decision-making and strategic planning.
But these platforms don't stop at data consolidation. They also offer industry-leading data templates to power your strategic initiatives. These templates act as frameworks for driving initiatives that deliver real business value, taking into account key performance metrics including but not limited to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Lifetime Value (LTV), and On-Time In-Full (OTIF) rates. By harnessing the power of these bespoke templates, businesses can create and implement effective strategies, improving their bottom-line metrics and overall performance.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while ERP systems like NetSuite provide basic capabilities in data consolidation and analysis, they present key challenges that can compromise the implementation of strategies that could boost an organisation's performance.
Data value platforms, such as Kleene.ai, emerge as game-changing solutions in this scenario. They offer comprehensive data consolidation, enabling a true “single source of truth” that encompasses all business data. They tackle the issue of slow and inconsistent report generation, optimising the process with pre-run queries and enabling quick, visual analysis. By allowing the seamless blending of data from various sources, they ensure that businesses have a full picture for making decisions. Finally, they surpass traditional ERP systems by allowing users to implement strategic initiatives that drive real business value.
Overall, data value platforms like Kleene.ai transform the challenges presented by ERP systems into avenues for improvement and growth. By empowering businesses with a more extensive and effective use of their data, they pave the way towards becoming truly data-driven, capable of strategic decision-making that can significantly enhance bottom-line metrics and overall performance.
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