Drive Value From Your Infor Erp With Unified Analytics

…in favor of a unified data strategy and a strong data governance program.
While a unified data strategy can aid you in streamlining your data management process and reducing duplication of effort, data governance can help ensure that data quality standards are being followed. What constitutes data? Where and how is it collected, extracted, and used? Who owns and maintains the data? A unified data governance program will answer all of these questions, eliminate departmental silos and the multiple versions of the truth that come with these silos, to help create a single source of truth.

A modern analytics platform not only democratizes access to data, but when supported by a robust data governance program it also allows businesses to implement role-based authorizations and ensures compliance with regulatory standards. In practice, this centralized yet flexible mechanism may look something like this; A C-suite executive would be able to access a sales dataset with all the relevant KPIs for every business region, but a regional sales manager would only be able to access the sales data for their respective sales region.

…to a unified, near real-time view of your end-to-end business performance with BI semantic models
A unified analytics solution acts as a base that facilitates all of the organization’s data needs. Whether you are C-suite level user who needs a high-level dashboard view of the business, or a technical user who would prefer to access the data warehouse and do their own analytics – the BI semantic model in your unified analytics platform will act as a translation layer between your enterprise applications and underlying data structures. This capability to tap into both governed and self-service analytics means that your business users don’t have to rely on your IT teams to generate and run reports nor do they have to risk mistakes when trying to replicate models in their spreadsheets. In shifting to an analytics platform that has modeled KPIs and metrics specific to your business requirements, you free your business users from concerns about the technical complexity making it much simpler for them to access the insights they need.

…with an assessment of your organization’s data analytics maturity and a clear data strategy
Part of the solution lies in effective change management and clear communication of the true value of the implementation. Another part of the solution lies in developing a data strategy and analytics roadmap that aligns with your organizational objectives, putting the right architecture in place, and identifying the analytics use cases with actual end users in mind. It also includes creating a governance framework to ensure that the analytics platform remains relevant and is able to meet the evolving needs of your business.

Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) that functions with discipline at the core and flexibility at the edge can help drive analytics adoption in your organization. Apart from promoting a data-driven culture, a CoE will facilitate a bottom-up approach to governance by continuously evaluating which aspects of the current data strategy works well and what doesn’t.

…by building a solid data analytics foundation to fully leverage the power of AI
Artificial intelligence can unlock boundless opportunities for organizations to innovate and drive growth. But before venturing down the AI route, organizations must ensure that they lay the proper data foundation to avoid the risk of having to shelve AI projects midway because they are unable to access the data they need.

Take for example, the advent of Microsoft Fabric which unifies data ingestion, storage, data warehousing, business intelligence and advanced analytics capabilities through a service. It eliminates the need for data movement once ingested and also drastically reduces infrastructure management overhead, therefore allowing you to focus on what’s important with your data; innovation and growth.

It doesn’t end there. AI copilots allow users to direct their biggest business questions in conversational language to their data, generate and customize reports and dashboards in seconds. This helps businesses tackle the issue of low user adoption of analytics by taking down the perceived difficulties that users may have when trying to adopt the analytics platform in their day-to-day work.

Users also have the ability to create copilots that pull insights from your data in the analytics platform and action it right back into your Infor M3/CloudSuite. This continuous digital feedback loop helps users understand how they can optimize business processes.