Using GenAI to Improve ERP Reporting Quality and Business Access

Since the early 1990’s modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have become the foundation for most every organization’s business management. These systems are used to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities ranging from back office (primarily financial) functions to front office and customer-facing (supply chain, marketing, sales and service) functions.

The good news was the development of a single source of truth for digital data and decisions regarding the health and welfare of business operations. The downside was a new requirement for the development of a business analytics department responsible for satisfying the seemingly insatiable needs for the development of customized reports and dashboards required by business leaders to analyze that data and make daily decisions that directly impact profitability, productivity, waste and compliance, just to name a few key areas.

As CFOs establish their role as leaders of innovation, AI-innovation projects are becoming the highest priority for budget planning and as you can imagine, their ERP systems become a prime focus area. According to an IDC Spotlight titled “Using AI to boost ERP and drive business performance”, “When an ERP system is fueled with AI, it becomes more intelligent, automated, and innovative, providing an opportunity for the business to create a differentiating competitive advantage.”

The natural pull between quality and productivity

Gartner Group has published an eBook titled “GenAI Planning Workbook” and reminds us to “focus GenAI conversations on real business problems and achievable use cases.” All too often we tend to believe that increases in productivity are the primary driver for AI-transformation projects, but it turns out that quality improvements may be the bigger draw.

Understanding there is a natural tension between quality and productivity, you can consider the most significant benefits of advanced analytics for ERP being realized along these six areas:

• Precision forecasting: eliminate guessing games and establish proactive strategic planning by analyzing historical data to identify patterns and make more accurate predictions about the future.
• Streamlined processes: Automate many of your ERP processes in order to free up time and critical resources for more proactive innovation initiatives.
• Actionable insights: Make sense of your data by identifying customer preferences, predicting market trends, and getting the information you need to stay ahead of the curve.
• Smarter decision-making: Analyzing real-time data to quickly identify trends and respond to changes in the market requires a reliance on data, not guesswork, to make informed decisions with confidence. AI-enabled ERP reports and dashboards ensures quality through contextualization.
• Efficiency optimization: Identifying inefficiencies and streamlining your processes can optimize your operations while minimizing identified waste.
• Cost savings: With increased efficiency and automation comes cost savings, especially with the focused use of specialized resources for ERP and data analytics.

GenAI-enabling your ERP is easier than you may think

You don’t necessarily have to wait for a huge IT budget and development cycle to be available to achieve business-led ERP AI-enablement. It all starts 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 ERP system, then prioritize decision requirements that will most impact ERP 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 ERP data analytics ecosystem to combine the best of current ERP and BI investments with new GenAI and reinforcement learning platforms to enable business-led ERP AI-enablement
• Step 4 - EMPOWER: Business leaders get trained to satisfy their own 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 business-led ERP AI-enablement will be an ongoing learning experience for both the human and machine elements of the solution to planning, execution, analysis, and improvement recognition iterated ad infinitum

Why wait for data analysts when a business leader can answer their own questions?

How many times have you had to submit a request for a new ERP report or dashboard and then wait until a data scientist or analyst was available to deliver, only to realize that you may have not been completely clear in your original request or circumstances have since changed and now you need slightly different metrics? How much time and resource is wasted by those same data scientists and analysts chasing yet another report to be generated instead of focusing on developing new innovations?

Decision makers who desire to make sense of their ERP data in ways that were never thought possible and explore the benefits of modernizing their analytics infrastructure and now evaluating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and reinforcement learning solutions to supercharge their ERP infrastructure. Open source, no-code solutions like UBIX can AI-enable your ERP to supercharge the quality of reporting and analysis Additionally, UBIX can consume native ERP as well as 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.

Learning how GenAI and Reinforcement Learning can improve the quality and access to your ERP data has never been easier, download our free eBook titled “5 Steps to AI Business Transformation Success” to help better understand the nuances of emerging AI concepts and technologies and offer a set of best practices for consideration 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.