Companies are producing more data than ever before. Financial, inventory, marketing, customer and sales data are just some of the common data points businesses regularly generate, and this data details the current state of the business. With this data, you can run reports, create dashboards and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor, glean insights into, and run your business. However, as companies grow and expand, they usually need to analyze more data from additional sources, and this requires going beyond the capabilities of transactional reporting to truly understand how to improve and grow the business.
Transactional reporting provides visibility to see that sales last month lagged behind those of the same month last year, but this data can’t help you understand why. What if you could add website traffic and supply chain information into your analysis? It might then lead to key insights like correlations between web marketing spend and monthly sales or how backorder issues caused a dip in order fulfillment.
Unfortunately, when it comes to combining multiple data sources from different operational systems to analyze these types of questions, there are limitations, including:
- Only one source of data is included in the analysis
- Large data sets take too long to process
- Limited visualizations make it harder to understand the data
- Analytics like trending, point in time or spotting outliers is not possible
- Advancements in technology, like machine learning, are not available to aid the analysis
Companies often try to work around these limitations by moving data in and out of spreadsheets, build their own data warehouse solutions, overspend on multiple point solutions to stitch it all together or simply don’t make the effort and make decisions based on partial or incomplete data. One thing is certain: as this data builds over time, it becomes more challenging and expensive to bring it all together for a comprehensive analysis. And let’s face it, spreadsheets quickly outlive their usefulness when you need to analyze thousands of sales order lines quickly.
Providing Business Agility to Make Better Decisions
To help with these challenges, NetSuite is introducing NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. It is a cloud-based, analytics platform and data warehouse built leveraging Oracle Analytics Cloud, a machine learning-powered analytical tool, and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. It aggregates multiple sources of data, including NetSuite data, to provide more comprehensive data analysis to improve decision making without coding. If your business is spending too much time or money exporting information to spreadsheets from multiple sources or facing the common analytics challenges described above, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse can help by connecting all of this data in a single place with prebuilt data pipelines to give you access to all of your information whenever you need it. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse brings deeper context to your data by consolidating all data sources and driving rich comparative analytics. In addition to having prebuilt data pipelines to bring data into the warehouse, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse comes with prebuilt NetSuite KPIs and dashboards so decision makers and analysts can achieve a faster time to value, discover new data trends and answer questions with more confidence.
You can easily bring new data sources into the warehouse without coding, making it faster to make more insightful and impactful strategic decisions. More than 25 prebuilt connectors to common platforms, like Salesforce and Google Analytics, are included. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse can also be used to store all your legacy data for audit or compliance purposes. It also delivers:
- New insights –spot trends, explore data easier and create historical snapshots to compare business performance or metrics at specific points in time using data from multiple systems.
- Faster analysis – with prebuilt dashboards and data objects, the ability to drill down from summary to detail, and a robust library of over 40 visualizations and charts you can see data from all your business systems in one place.
- Collaboration – helps foster data driven conversations with in-app annotation, the ability to export analyses and charts to documents or presentations, and auto-generated data narratives giving clearer insights and improved communication.
- Self Service – with proper access rights and permissions, all users have the ability to explore, model and analyze data without relying on IT resources.
- Prebuilt dashboards and KPIs are provided and can be customized or extended to meet your analytical needs.
Rapid Deployment, Faster Time to Value
As a prebuilt solution, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse can save up to 50% of the cost to build your own data warehouse, providing at least six times faster time to value. Built to harness the proven power of Oracle Analytics Cloud and Autonomous Data Warehouse as a foundation, there is now a central place to perform richer and deeper analysis to support more informed, more strategic decision making to drive future growth. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse will help you be more competitive by transforming your data to understand sales in new ways, provide greater visibility and analysis of inventory and build more confidence in your decision making.