Your ERP solution is the central source of truth for all your enterprise data. These data include your transactions across all your departments, but also include vital information on the series of actions that have occurred in any particular order. The value in analyzing and visualizing this data can be extremely revealing in the forms of inefficiencies that plague your organization.
These analyses need not be localized to a particular department in question but could potentially span several departments. This is where it gets particularly interesting because few of the trends that emerge from these analyses may not be as intuitive as your departmental heads might assume. Let us examine how ERP dashboards can help you take advantage of the data trove that your ERP generates.
ERP dashboards for Financial Management
A vital KPI of your finance team would be the Days Payable Outstanding, which is the average number of days your company takes to pay your vendors and suppliers. Using the underlying Accounts Payable (AP) data in your ERP and the actual dates on which the invoices were raised by the vendor and paid by your accounts department, a finance leader can closely monitor this vital cash flow KPI and ensure that it is within acceptable limits. On the execution front, a different view of the sale data can show your accounts executives the high priority outstanding invoices and the impact non-payment may have in the form of penalties or surcharge. Such actionable insights not merely provide a clear impact to your company’s bottom-line, but also increase productivity of your frontline staff by helping them prioritize the most crucial tasks.
VIENNA Advantage Financial Management Dashboard
ERP dashboards for Supplier Management
Managing performance of your suppliers and vendors is a key priority of your company’s procurement department. For every empaneled vendor, each transaction provides important performance data, which is stored in the ERP system. A useful Procurement dashboard can help the Head of Procurement get instant information on each vendor’s Net Promoter Score and Delivery Performance. For suppliers with a poor score, it is possible to entirely renegotiate procurement terms or look for alternate suppliers if there are more severe non-compliance such as violating your company’s Health, Safety and Environment SOPs. The ERP provides users with the ability to enter this information for each approved Purchase Order, but it is indeed the power of a well-designed dashboard that will provide such insights to the company’s leadership.
VIENNA Advantage Supplier Management Dashboard
Inventory Management Dashboard
As any MRP Controller would reveal, to get real-time visibility on the inventory situation of a company is crucial to ensure no production downtime or that the warehouse has sufficient stock to ensure fulfilment of completed orders. But as the ERP system captures the good receipt and goods issue information, advanced ERP dashboards can provide a snapshot of critical KPIs such as the Value and Quantity of Inventory on Hand and also provide information on the historical material availability rate, inventory turnover rate and days of cover that your company is presently working with. With a direct visibility of materials at risk of being understocked, the MRP Controller can initiate corrective actions to initiate procurement or follow-up with the Procurement department on an open Purchase Order. In all likelihood, the same dashboard would provide information on open Purchase Orders for the said material and the expected receipt date based on the fulfilment lead time as is recorded in the ERP system. As you can appreciate, the value of such an analytical ERP dashboard cannot be overstated because it can help the nerve center of a manufacturing organization make better decisions.
VIENNA Advantage Inventory Management Dashboard
Order Management Dashboard
One of the most critical areas of an organization is the order management because it directly impacts your reputation with the customer. A comprehensive Order Management dashboard can provide the right information, at the right level of aggregation to the right personnel to avoid emergencies. For instance, a dashboard could provide a Customer Service personnel information on backlog of orders. Drilling down through an individual order can provide insight into the cause for the backlog – whether it is material shortage or lack of production capacity. The Customer Service representative can use this information to reallocate the available material to delayed orders and ensure that customer SLAs are either wholly or partially met and revenue targets are not compromised. Similarly, a good dashboard should be able to display orders that are the highest risk for an on-time-delivery or an OTD, for the customer service or the sales personnel to take corrective actions against such an alert.
VIENNA Advantage Order Management Dashboard
Procurement Management Dashboard
Procurement directly impacts your company’s costs and an ERP dashboard that can provide your procurement staff with the right information can be a vital tool to control and rationalize costs. An ERP system has all the information in the form of master data on materials, suppliers or vendors and the respective contracts that the company has in place for various material categories. For a procurement executive, a useful ERP dashboard can provide information on all approved Purchase Requisitions that are not linked to a Blanket Purchase Order or a Contract, thereby ensuring that all procurement takes place within the ambit of negotiated contracts with approved vendors. Another classic Procurement dashboard is related to Spend Analysis, where ERP data on closed purchase orders and the corresponding vendor invoices can provide an accurate history of the cost of material procurement across various material categories and organizational departments. This can be an effective tool to monitor budget versus actual expenditure and ensure that profitability margins are not compromised on.
VIENNA Advantage Procurement Management Dashboard
Moving forward…
Reporting that uses your ERP data has to move beyond the traditional periodic Management Information Service (MIS) that used to be traditionally created for reporting purposes. With the technological capabilities of today’s ERP solutions such as those from VIENNA Advantage, companies can use near real-time data to generate dashboards and insights from transactional data and enter a new era of exception-based management of processes. With such advanced dashboards, business leaders can be proactive in their business decisions and take crucial real-time decisions that would eventually impact your company’s profitability and market share.
Compared to the reactive approach of traditional MIS, the analytics capabilities of ERP solutions have dramatically increased and adopting solutions such as VIENNA Advantage, could propel your business performance in a way that will be pleasing to your employees and shareholders alike.
