Manufacturers in North America Not Fully Leveraging the Benefits of Business Intelligence, IFS Study Concludes

IFS (STO:IFSA) (STO:IFSB), the global enterprise software company, has released a study indicating that most manufacturing companies are not reaping the full benefits of business intelligence (BI) analytics with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.  The study, conducted jointly with Advantage Business Media, is based on a survey of 174 executives with manufacturing companies in North America.

For manufacturing businesses, which increasingly are adopting Engineer-to-Order and Design-Build-Facilitate processes, BI is about providing users with the most current in-context analytics so they can act on their insights in real-time. But the full value of BI is realized when analytics are quickly and easily accessible from functional screens within the ERP system, so users can refine the data to help make immediate, bottom-line decisions.

According to the study results, 64 percent of respondents confirmed they find great value in BI and are making strides to implement it in their decision-making processes. However, most organizations are still accessing their BI analytics using disparate external tools that are not integrated with their ERP system, creating a process that is time-consuming and cumbersome for users.

Among the key findings:

· Almost half of the respondents with a BI solution are using a data warehouse to pull data from their ERP solution for BI purposes with analytic tools separate from their ERP solution.

· Roughly one third of respondents are using their ERP solution to pull data into an external BI tool for analysis. This may provide the most up-to-date information to the BI tool, but not necessarily in-context with the ERP solution.

· Of those respondents that have implemented a BI program, only a minority currently have their BI functionality built-in to their ERP system.

"Business intelligence is all about presenting useful information to end users so they can make smart decisions at the time they need it,” IFS North America Chief Technology Officer Rick Veague said. "When this data is readily accessible to users and the application where they need to apply it, ideally through a single BI solution built into the ERP system, they are more likely to engage with it regularly, allowing the business to fully realize the bottom-line benefits that business analytics have to offer.”

The study is available for free download at: download.ifsworld.com/studies (http://download.ifsworld.com/home/if1/page_1050/built_in_business_intelligence.html).

About IFS

IFS (http://www.ifsworld.com/en/)™ is a globally recognized leader in developing and delivering business software for enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and enterprise service management (ESM). IFS brings customers in targeted sectors closer to their business, helps them be more agile and enables them to profit from change. IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) that was founded in 1983 and currently has over 2,600 employees. IFS supports more than 2,200 customers worldwide from local offices and through partners in more than 60 countries. For more information, visit: www.ifsworld.com.

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