Whitepaper: Build vs. Buy: Choosing your path to a true BI solution for ERP data

For financial leaders like you, the impact of high-quality data and reporting on your business is significant. The right insights can help you improve the accuracy of your financial plans, quickly identify trends in sales and retention, find answers to complex questions and better prepare for board meetings.

But producing the right reports with the speed, accuracy and scalability you need is no easy task. That’s because today’s ERP systems provide baseline financial reporting, but they don’t integrate multiple data sources well. This leaves critical information from CRM, inventory, contract management and other systems out of view and creates data blind spots for SaaS, e-commerce, transportation, manufacturing, retail and service businesses alike.

To eliminate these blind spots and bring all your important data together for reporting and analytics, you often have to decide between the following approaches:

If you’re like most financial leaders, you’ve likely tried using spreadsheets to tie your data together and produce the reports you need. And you’ve likely discovered that this manual, time-consuming, repetitive process commonly causes errors and does not scale. This leaves you with two viable options: build your own business intelligence (BI) solution or buy a pre-built BI system.

To help you weigh these two options and make the right decision, we’ve assembled a guide that examines each approach by considering the key dynamics of development time, costs, risks and ongoing maintenance needs. But first, let’s start with a brief introduction of Zone & Co and a discussion of the capabilities we think are required in a true BI system for ERP data.