A mid-sized company recently told me that most of the application software they had evaluated lately did not make it easy for end-users to “get at the data,” much less write their own reports!

This is a common complaint.

Fortunately, there is renewed focus on new Business Intelligence (BI) Tools in the marketplace, and how they can be integrated with ERP, P2P, Budgets, etc.

A software platform needs to first provide meaningful standard reports and inquiries. As it relates to P2P, this means making reports available that help Buyers analyze Dollar Commitments, evaluate price trends, check on open order status, etc.

But that’s not enough. End-users are forever being asked by management for special one-time analysis of Purchases, Payments, etc. A tool is needed to perform these important analyses.

Providing a Data Dictionary is not enough. It must be easy to manipulate data and perform calculations that accurately portray spend data within a system. An enhanced capability would allow data residing in other systems to be incorporated in the analysis. This might include data from Accounting, Budgeting, ERP, etc.

At the end of the day, BI needs to provide Actionable Business Intelligence. This means the data is timely, meaningful, and accurate … not just accounting-oriented stale data from 6 weeks after Month- or Quarter-end.

Ultimately, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) must be determined and actual data compared to Best Practice Benchmarks. This will be the next phase of BI in the P2P world.