While companies race to become data driven, a new global study shows organizations increasingly face challenges getting the right data in the right place for critical business decisions. According to the study, conducted by Dimensional Research for Fivetran, the global leader in modern data integration, the lack of real-time insights from ERP systems is a significant contributing factor.

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Traditional ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, such as SAP and Oracle databases, are widely used across the Fortune 500 to house critical operational data. While ubiquitous for enterprises today, very few companies are able to correctly leverage the data of these systems for decision-making. According to the study, nearly 9 out of 10 companies report that they are unable to pull real-time insights from their legacy ERP systems to make smart business decisions.

The study findings include:

• 86 percent of respondents say their business needs access to real-time ERP data to make smart business decisions, yet only 23 percent of responding companies have systems in place to make that possible.
• 82 percent of companies are making decisions based on stale information.
• 85 percent state this stale data is leading to incorrect decisions and lost revenue.
• 99 percent are struggling to gain consistent access to information stored in their ERP systems.
• 65 percent of respondents say access to ERP data is difficult and 78 percent indicate software vendors intentionally make data access difficult. Those surveyed said poor access to ERP data directly impacts the business with slowed operations, bad decision-making and lost revenue.

“If companies are going to truly be data driven, they cannot base decisions on only a fraction of the information or out-of-date business data,” said George Fraser, CEO at Fivetran. “Success with data requires looking at the freshest, most complete dataset possible. Winning companies are the ones that are nimble enough to access the most current data and immediately put it to work.”

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For businesses today, the requirement to successfully put data to work is being able to access all data across cloud and on-premise technology such as ERP systems. Traditional ERP systems house critical operational data such as supply chain and manufacturing information. This information needs to be married, for example, with the data housed in marketing and sales systems to give businesses the information they need to be responsive to market trends.

For example, large retailers need to quickly be able to spot trends in the market based on product color, geography or style by analyzing the data in their sales and marketing systems. That data then needs to be compared to production, inventory and supply chain information that is housed and managed in ERP systems. This data must be accessible 24/7/365 and on a moment’s notice.

Fivetran makes this possible by giving businesses access to SAP, Oracle and other ERP data instantly – the same way a utility provides electricity. Fivetran provides a cloud data integration service that manages data pipelines for the world’s leading companies from enterprises to fast-moving startups. Its prebuilt connectors automatically adapt as schemas and APIs change, allowing companies to quickly centralize and transform data from both SaaS and on-prem data sources into high-performance cloud destinations. As a result, companies are able to increase operational efficiency and accelerate data analysis for critical business decisions.

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