Open Source ERP Guru

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) software is a set of technologies and best practices providing insight into business activities.

The need for business intelligence is an integral part of any operational information system (e.g. ERP). Initially, reports were used to retrieve such information, but as users became more demanding and sophisticated , and the amount of enterprise data requiring analysis grew exponentially, software companies started developing stand-alone BI tools, separate from their transactional systems-ERP.

These BI tools initially included a database designed specifically to allow multi-dimensional analysis of large amounts of data (data warehouse) and tools to query and mine that warehouse. An example for such a query might be comparing year-over-year sales in a region of a specific line of products.

BI tools evolved further,improving data extraction processes from the source ERP systems,enhancing performance and user experience through graphical and web-based querying tools.

BI And Open Source ERP

As far as Open Source ERP software is concerned, BI is beyond the scope of current solutions.Since the requirements for core ERP functionality (improvements in manufacturing,P.O.S,web integration,user interface,interoperability,support for standards etc.) are almost endless, BI is better left for dedicate open source projects.

OFBiz does provides some core functionality to enable usage of a BI solution on top of its application, but this functionality is still in early stages. I don’t see other solutions develop their own BI solutions.

That leaves us with Pentaho – the leading open source BI software. Pentaho provides a lot of functionality, such as:

• Data Integration – Pentaho’s ETL (Extract,Transform,Load) tool enables simple extraction of data from multiple source systems (ERP, for example), transforming and loading data into a stand alone database which then can be used for reporting and mining.
• Reporting – the basis of all BI solutions, reporting tools allows power users to design and run their own queries, saving time and money spent on development of custom reports.
• Data Mining – data mining is the process of extracting meaningful business information from large amounts of data. Data mining outputs can be used to support business decisions or identify market trends. One example of data mining usage is ‘If you bought the book Catcher in the Rye you might like Catch 22′ suggestions in sites like Amazon – the software mines the customers’ purchasing data to recommend other products based on historical sales data.

Although some would argue that for small businesses, BI is not useful as implementation costs and time might out-weigh the benefits, I believe that if a pre-configured package, including an interface between one of the leading Open Source ERP and Pentaho will be available, BI can be easily implemented providing tons of value to Open Source ERP customers.

I will download and install Pentaho and connect it to one of the Open Source ERP solutions (either Openbravo or OFBiz) and post my take on the process.