How NetSuite Business Intelligence Tool Helps Integration Strategy

In a perfect world, an ERP would have all of the necessary business analytics tools for a given organization, acting as a single resource. In addition to their ERP data, businesses also use other strategic systems, such as the best-in-class CRM, POS, eCommerce, WMS, and other solutions that are essential to their performance.  

Although ERP systems are the center of an organization, its users frequently link to other systems to improve decision-making, optimize business processes, and make data more visible. This might be really difficult!  

How to Choose Between Data Integration and Application Integration  

Both transactional and reporting data sets show how ERP and other system data are combined. There are numerous enterprise systems with overlapping data sets and capabilities where business processes like accounting can be found.  

Redundancies and connectivity between these systems can be managed in various ways. The ‘Swivel Chair’ integration, also called the swivel chair interface, is an input and interaction method for computers that require users to switch between interfaces, sometimes duplicating work in which data is manually connected between these disjointed systems. The "Swivel Chair" integration is the easiest to use.  This method compromises the integrity of the data, is inefficient, and is prone to human mistakes instead of automating the synchronization of the data with checks and balances.  

There are two common ways to solve NetSuite integration issues:  

1. Integration of Applications 

Moving live data between two systems in almost real-time, updating business processes across many apps. These links, also known as point-to-point integrations, are built specifically to enhance or add value to the system's data set. Changing client information from CRM to ERP is an example.  

2. Integration of Data  

A data warehouse is often used to centralize different data sources from diverse systems in order to facilitate reporting, migration, or consolidation. Large data sets are more easily captured for analysis, migration, and processing when data integration is done using batch operations.  

Despite the fact that both approaches demand preparation and work, application integration efforts frequently produce a subset of data that is specific to each system and is meant to add value to operational activities. As opposed to this, data integration assignments frequently concentrate on a more comprehensive perspective of business data, enhancing overall analytics that are crucial to a corporation.  

Data Integration Challenges with NetSuite  

There are numerous powerful cloud-based integration solutions available for integration projects with NetSuite ERP. The platforms including Boomi and Celigo, which connect dependable data flows between NetSuite and outside applications, are familiar to NetSuite partners.  

The Benefits of a BI Platform for NetSuite Data  

Application integrations are often project-based endeavors, as most NetSuite clients are aware. Every system integration with the ERP in this situation has a different set of requirements to address a particular data interchange between two or more systems. The success of these kinds of integrations can frequently and efficiently ensured by utilizing iPaaS solutions (such as Boomi and Celigo).  

Data integration projects, on the other hand, have a wider reach and permit the ongoing ingestion of original and fresh data sources created to combine information for reporting purposes. In essence, data integration calls for far greater flexibility in the way that data is exchanged between the various systems.  

As a result, these linkages frequently exist in a single location (such as a data warehouse) where the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is in line with a less expensive business intelligence (BI) platform. This enables you to quickly iterate across dataset updates.  

Customers of NetSuite have limited access to and flexibility with ERP data. Controlled access is provided within the solution's data structure for the majority of saved searches and other Netsuite data extraction features. There are frequent restrictions between tables, and some use cases necessitate intensive scripting and customization in order to create specialized reporting across NetSuite and non-NetSuite information.  

In fact, a system that converts native NetSuite data into a more adaptable data format is required for NetSuite data integration activities. Following that, it is extracted from a data warehouse so that businesses can perform more in-depth data analyses without affecting their ERP system. 

To find out how BI can fully implement, organize, and analyze data with NetSuite ERP and third-party apps, get in touch with Jobin & Jismi.