What’s The Latest Approach to delivering Finance Analytics leveraging pre-built Data Marts and Dashboards? 

With the modernization of the Cloud Data Warehouse platforms, the new approach to deliver Finance KPIs is to leverage pre-built Data Marts and Analytics solutions integrated with wide verities of ERPs such as NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Fusion, etc. The new approach should support multi-cloud and best-of-the-breed commercial platforms as opposed to a black-box approach. Finance FP&A and Corporate Finance are taking a paradigm shift and moving their data to the cloud and in this fast-changing global IT environment, the need of this hour is to have an easy-to-maintain, implement, and use, cost-effective solution which contains comprehensive Finance KPIs.

The key aspects which Finance FP&A, Corporate Finance, IT Data Ware Housing Team considering in their next-gen Finance Analytics solutions are:

• Seamless integration with a wide variety of ERP and CRM applications significantly reduces analysis efforts protecting the investment.
• Since many companies focus on their core business and have extremely limited IT bandwidth. They are preferring a solution that requires zero prior knowledge of APIs or data model for source systems.
• Leverage Open-standard Cloud-native technology to manage and scale.
• Comprehensive pre-defined Finance KPIs meeting corporate Finance and FP&A requirements.
• Best Practices around Cloud Data Integration (CDI) using connectors and ETL/ELT for data processing. 
• Self-Service Dashboards for both Operational and Leadership teams
• Bring your License Model – Companies have already invested in ETL, Data Warehouse, and Visualization as a result if a solution can leverage their existing license and offer Finance Analytics, that is a preferable choice for their Finance.
• On-going zero-downtime enhancement, upgrade, and support
• Significant reduction in Cost-of-Ownership and better value with ROI 
• Ability to expand the solution by adding additional pre-built components for Supply Chain, Marketing, and Sales Analytics on the existing platform.
• Minimal effort to migrate the existing legacy solution to packaged Analytics. 
• Ability to deploy the solution on AWS, GCP, and AZURE

Business Benefits :

While most of the customers are planning to migrate their on-prem Finance reporting point-solution to Cloud or trying to choose the appropriate cloud-based technologies for their new Finance Data Warehouse or customers deciding between build vs buy for the new Data Warehouse, a pre-built data warehouse could be a good solution. 

Some of the key benefits from choosing a pre-built Finance Data Warehouse are

Agility & Elasticity

The finance team will have access to industry-standard KPIs and will be able to quickly augment available metrics for changing business needs. The solution should include all the standard modules and KPIs including Revenue, CapEx, OpEx, Fixed Assets, Liquidity Analysis, Income, Profitability Analysis …etc across multiple entities or subsidiaries. 

Cost

For great success, the preferred solution should be cost-effective compared to owning legacy implementation or building a data warehouse from scratch along with ongoing maintenance. As well as it should enable faster delivery of business-critical KPIs and actionable insights.

Complexity

The solution should consist of a rich library of KPIs and metrics to translate, transform and cleanse source system information to deliver business intuitions. 

Governance & Risk

Security and Governance should be applied across all aspects of the solution. Democratization of sensitive information with appropriate access controls and delivery mechanisms. Discover and assess financial risk to customers’ business and develop a mitigation plan. Future-proof customer’s business by developing portable artifacts.

New Approach :

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) is a next-generation Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) supporting Cloud Data Integration (CDI) and Cloud Application Integration (CAI). IICS has pre-built connectors for a wide range of ERP, CRM, and Cloud Data Warehouse platforms. As part of the INFA Ready program, Informatica partners like Infometry offer multiple cloud connectors for applications like Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Bigtable,

Google Pub/Sub, Adaptive Insights, and HubSpot on Informatica Marketplace.  

Pre-packaged Finance Data Warehouse Analytics solution leveraging Informatica Cloud (IICS) can be represented with the following Architecture.

Customers will be leveraging highly configurable ETL/ETL mappings to extract data from ERP systems like NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Fusion, SAP..etc to a pre-built Finance Data Warehouse on a Cloud Data Warehouse platform Snowflake. Customers can pick the Cloud Analytics platform of their choice such as Tableau Online, Looker, or Microsoft Power BI to deploy Finance Dashboards.

InfoFiscus a pre-packaged Finance Analytics solution from Infometry, engineering of Informatica, leverage Informatica Cloud platform and Cloud Data Warehouse Snowflake. Infofiscus supports all three Analytics platforms Tableau Online, Looker, and Power BI.