Let’s face it, you probably wouldn’t, as you know that you’re unlikely to get a chuckle from your audience because they’d have no idea if the punch line is funny or not, as it would have no context.

• We sold £1million of Product X this year.
• Our Net Profit this year was £2 million.

In our business context, was this good? We don’t know – these are simply the punch lines.
Before we know whether we should smile or groan we need to know more.

• Is this better or worse than we had planned to do or have done in previous years?
• What profit did the business make for those sales? Did we make money or lose money?
• If we made money how does that compare with the other products we sell or the market in general?
• How well did we manage that sales volume?
• Did we meet the demand when it was there?
• Or did we have to make special efforts?
• And what impact on cost did this have?
• Did we discount the price to achieve this?
• If so, by how much and to whom?

When organisations analyse their business and its performance, it is always surprising how often and in how many ways only the punch lines are reported and analysed in detail, and how limited the context.

The trend is to assume that every sale made a profit and is always good. In most cases that’s probably true – but the world has seen what can happen when positive results are assumed. Banking models only assumed growth and never downturns or no growth – look what happened there – it turned out not to be true and banks fell. In today’s economic climate it is more important than ever to know every relevant detail.

1. So, do you know how much profit each sale makes you?
2. What is driving the costs of your business?
3. Where and when you incur the costs?
4. Which customers are profitable, and which ones are not?
5. Would you make a decision when you only knew one side of the story?

Surprisingly, if extrapolated to typical BI reporting structures this is exactly what businesses do every day – report from a single aspect of their business and make decisions. That may be okay when looking at your day-to-day operations in those areas, but the more complex and wider the implications of the decision, the richer the information needs to be to help support the decision-making process.

You’ve taken the decision to invest in an ERP system because you recognise that no single area in your business can operate without affecting other departments in some way, because each part contributes to the whole. So, why would you buy an analysis system that only looks at the business and its component parts as autonomous analysis areas, with very few relationships built between them?

ERP systems are structured into distinct areas as they need to be able to manage individual processes. They also move the data around its ERP structures when one process affects or impacts another – but only at the level of detail, or in the context, that the next process will need to fulfil its function. Its purpose is not to provide an information analysis framework when it decides what to move, and what to leave and when or where to do it – it is only interested in facilitating the next operational process (create a pick list).

This is why the problem with getting the desired information context or detail isn’t a case of ‘it doesn’t exist’ – it’s often a question of ‘I can’t get at it easily, or in a complete tied-up package easily, as it exists all over the place and across multiple tables in my ERP.’

It’s not that businesses do not want more details or richer context on the information they have. The challenge has always been getting that detail in a way that is easy, and where it is neatly tied together without having to jump through hoops, jump around multiple areas of the ERP and relate one report back to another, or go through a serious of data-manipulation exercises every time they need it.

All of this is time-consuming and can be difficult to get at directly from the ERP system. This is one of the biggest problems businesses are trying to solve when looking for a BI solution.

So, why would you pick one that just inherits the existing ERP system structures (and its weaknesses) when it comes to providing that BI solution, and makes very little effort to address the problem of rich-information context?

When we designed our product, the goal was to remove the barriers that exist to the information you have spent considerable time and effort capturing.  To create analysis worlds and not just a cube, a world where you can travel 360 degrees around your question or traverse the information to get to the answers you need effortlessly.  Enabling you to eliminate baseless assumptions and guesswork.

Why don’t all BI Systems do this? Because it’s extremely hard to do so! It’s easier (and cheaper) to work within the existing framework and relationships rather than go and improve upon them.

Customers however, need to expect more too, because when the tick list for what product to buy only focuses on the punch lines, and accepts disjointed analysis, this is exactly what you’ll get.