Bridging Multiple ERP Systems with GenAI for Better Reporting and Business Access

Is your technical debt exceeding your ability to deliver business value? Is it more effective to treat the disease or the symptom? By way of metaphor: if someone sneezes, do you hand them a tissue assuming allergies or send them to the ER expecting bronchogenic carcinoma? How do you discern disease from symptom in your everyday IT prioritization?

Did you know that there is a disease that affects most every enterprise today that can become a silent killer? Unfortunately, it will not show up as a specific line item in many technology priority lists as it isn’t as sexy or timely as AI enablement or as pressing as reducing the current technical debt of business. It even has a name in some circles. For those still curious, we are referring to ERP bloat.

Living with multiple ERP systems

Enterprise Resource Planning systems have been at the heart of the technology stack for most (if not every) corporation since the early 1990’s rising from the ashes of the Material Resource Planning solutions of the 1970’s. As with any technology over a decade (or three) in use, the sheer number of version upgrades combined with technology and core data-handling advancements has led to a system requiring dedicated resources with very specific skillsets to keep them operational. Now magnify that by a factor of two to three to accommodate the multiple ERP solutions most probably hiding across your enterprise today and you start to get sense of the size of the problem.

Having to deal with multiple ERP systems in a single organization should not be a surprise given the sheer amount of mergers and acquisition in just 2023 alone at over 40,000. So, having to deal with multiple ERP systems in a single company has become a fact of life and having to address the very real business requirements of bridging these disparate systems to make unified business decisions can mean the difference between success and failure.

Bridging ERP systems is easier than you may think

Organizations looking to stay competitive are exploring the benefits of modernizing their analytics infrastructure with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and reinforcement learning solutions to supercharge their ERP infrastructure and reduce (if not eliminate) ERP bloat.

Why wait for a huge IT budget and development cycle to be available to achieve business-led ERP AI-enablement? Instead, start with taking citizen data scientists and turning them into PhD-level experts through these 5 steps:

• Step 1 - IDENTIFY: Identify a cross functional team including business leaders and technical resources that focus on your all of your disparate ERP systems, then prioritize decision requirements that will most impact cross-ERP system reporting and dashboard critical success factors
• Step 2 - CONNECT: All available ERP and associated data sources inside and outside the enterprise should be identified and connected to the model along with access to business policies
• Step 3 - ENABLE: Develop a new cross-ERP data analytics ecosystem to combine the best of all current ERP and BI investments with new GenAI and reinforcement learning platforms to eliminate ERP bloat
• Step 4 - EMPOWER: Business leaders get trained to satisfy their own multisystem ERP requests for realtime analytics all with the only requirement being the ability to ask a question and therefore freeing valuable data science resources to focus on bigger picture revolutionary change opportunities
• Step 5 - ITERATE: Understand that this is a process, not a project, so bridging ERP systems will be an ongoing learning experience for both the human and machine elements of an AI-enabled intelligent cloud solution to planning, execution, analysis, and improvement recognition iterated ad infinitum

Bridging ERP systems with an Intelligent Cloud

Business leaders who desire to make sense of data from across multiple ERP systems are pushing for intelligent cloud solutions to deliver on the promise of business-led AI transformation.

Open source, no-code intelligent cloud solutions like UBIX can bridge your multiple ERP systems to supercharge the quality of reporting and analysis. In addition to consuming most all native ERP, UBIX can consume other on-premise infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure and cloud application datasets directly, making the integration seamless and ensuring that your existing data assets are fully utilized.

Understanding the nuances of an intelligent cloud and how a no code solution can deliver on the promise of bridging multiple ERP systems has never been easier. Download our free eBook titled “Solving the Problem of Data and Decision Making” to help better understand the details of emerging AI concepts and how to ensure digital transformation and business-led AI success. Or if you can spare 22 minutes for a mini–AI Readiness Workshop, you can contact one of our AI experts today.