The real value of an ERP system is only realised once the system starts to deliver strategic and operational intelligence through reporting to management.

The first important phase of ERP implementation is to establish financial functionality to enable reliable accounting of revenue and expenditure. Once completed, your business should have better control over revenue and expenses. This, however, is not enough in today's competitive world, where making the right decisions are dependent on having access to information now, and being smart about the way you run a business could be the deciding factor whether the business grows or perishes.

To illustrate, we ask you to imagine yourself as the chief executive of a large organisation, and to think of six items that should be reported on and monitored to ensure the business is under control and growing. Deciding which items to include can be difficult, not to mention the difficulty obtaining timeous reports on these items.

As an example, the six items chosen by the CEO to monitor for, say, a cheese factory, could be:

1. How much cheese was produced over the periods yesterday, year to date, and last year?
2. What was the stock level of fresh milk at 7am, the past month's daily average and the past year's monthly averages?
3. What is the actual value of stock (cheese) at each warehouse and retail outlet?
4. What was the manpower level at 7am at the main cheese factory?
5. What was the average turnover, cost and profit month to date and how does it compare to last month and last year?
6. What was the cash-flow situation at 8am, in terms of bank balance, debtors balance, creditors and outstanding POs?

With Sage Intelligence, which comes standard with each newly acquired Sage ERP system, we create reports that will help management increase business efficiency. Reports are rendered to nominated persons as and when required, and reports are published to PCs and most mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones. By using the Sage Connector module, information can be extracted from any system such as shown in the examples below, which examples were extracted from Sage ERP, SharePoint, Sage VIP and Cloud server monitoring software.

Example BI Dashboards