Technological advancements have transformed businesses by giving them endless opportunities to harness the power of data for achieving business growth. Businesses now rely heavily on various technologies to run the show and better control all aspects of business operations by monitoring its effectiveness based on data analysis. Analytics help to do a threadbare analysis of various business activities to understand each function’s performance level like sales, marketing, manufacturing, inventory control, procurement, and accounting. Data analysis is useful for understanding the business inside out and why people believe that businesses are now data driven.
The need for data integration for business
Businesses had always generated massive data that mostly remained unexplored because of the lack of means to handle it effectively. As the digital revolution swept the world and businesses embraced modern technology to increase efficiencies and productivity, the options of gathering data from various applications widened. As data started flowing heavily from numerous operations like marketing, sales, production, research and development, human resources management, and supply chain, businesses began using on-premise data storage systems. Although data storage happened within compartments to analyze various inter-related data, it became necessary to integrate data and enable slicing and dicing for obtaining specific reports.
What is data integration?
To extract vital information from data, it is necessary to mix and match data obtained from various operations and collected in different applications like CRM, ERP, finance, and accounts packages. To mix and match data from multiple sources, it is necessary to use technological tools like NetSuite integration that provide the interface and facilitate smooth data exchange between various data sources. Through data integration, you ensure proper dissemination of data and carry out multiple data analysis that reveals a lot of useful information and insights about the business processes and the overall business performance. The tools used for data integration can process millions of data in seconds and speed up the decision making process.
How do the data integration tools work?
Using some data integration tools, you can keep all data flowing from different sources completely synchronized so that there is no gap in the data flow. NetSuite data integration tools are cloud-based applications that use a service for syncing data and then copy it to any other system that users want. Users can then use the data according to their need in the ERP system, sent the data to data warehouses, or use it for e-commerce sites, to name a few. There can be many other uses of data depending on the organizational needs.
Data integration is nothing but data synthesis that users can plan according to business requirements to generate reports that reveal business health. Therefore, almost all reports are customizable to suit the business processes, and some standard reports are available by default.
Users can generate the reports either in some standard format or any tailor-made format that is easy to understand and provides meaningful information based on which business managers and leaders can make decisions.