A Friday afternoon ERP reporting question. How long would your ERP take to do this?
Take two weeks of sales and COGS, around 250,000 underlying accounting lines, and report them by fiscal week, site and customer group. Calculate sales, COGS and margin, compare them to the exact same fiscal weeks from the previous year, Sunday to Saturday, then bring in the budget and apply the classifications and business rules that determine what those numbers actually mean.
Mine did it this morning in 31 seconds, which I thought was pretty good.
But 31 seconds is probably not the interesting number. The interesting number is 243.
243 That is how many persisted reporting facts were left when it had finished doing all that work. So the next person who opens the dashboard doesn't need to ask those 250,000 accounting lines the same question again. Neither does the person after them.
AI and ERP reporting.
What happens when it isn't just people and dashboards asking these questions? What happens when Claude, Jeeves, Alice, Cortana, KITT, JARVIS, or whatever we eventually call our helpful little ERP friends start asking them too? Not once, but dozens of times a day, from different users and different sessions, with slightly different questions.
If every one of those questions starts by going back to the transaction tables, finding 250,000 accounting lines and reconstructing the same fiscal calendar, the same reporting classifications, the same margin logic, the same prior year comparison and the same budget logic, haven't we just found a clever new way to make our ERP do the same work over and over again?
For years I thought the answer to ERP reporting performance was mostly to write better queries. Make the saved search faster. Make the SQL smarter. Buy some BI and move the problem somewhere else. I'm starting to think that misses something fairly obvious.
If you've already done the work and arrived at 243 useful, governed facts, why not keep them? Then let the dashboards use them. Let the users use them. Let the AI use them.
And leave the 250,000 transaction lines alone until something actually changes.
Anyway, that's my Friday afternoon question. How long would your ERP take, and how many times today has it already calculated the same answer?