🎯 Situation

Yesterday at the playroom with my son, I struck up a conversation with a business owner while our kids played together.

He explained that he was currently working on his ERP and had a clear goal:

👉 Add dashboards directly into the system to handle analytics.

It's a very common approach, often encouraged by software vendors. But this conversation reminded me of a reality I regularly see in companies.

⚠️ Challenge

Many companies believe the best strategy is to put all their reports directly into the ERP or CRM. The approach has obvious advantages — but limitations tend to appear over time.

✅ Advantages

  • Relatively quick to set up
  • Single system to manage
  • Minimal infrastructure needed
  • Sufficient for basic needs

❌ Limitations

  • Hard to connect multiple data sources
  • Different KPIs across systems
  • Inflexible reports
  • Expensive custom development
  • Heavy vendor dependency

🔍 Analysis

In most cases, this approach works well at the start. Then the company grows and needs evolve:

  • Adding financial data
  • Integrating forecasts
  • Comparing multiple systems
  • Building more advanced KPIs
  • Creating more flexible dashboards

At that point, development cycles get longer, costs go up, and system dependency deepens. Switching tools becomes a complex and risky project.

✅ Best Practice

A more sustainable approach is to separate operational systems from analytics:

  • Extract data from your various systems
  • Centralize data in a common layer
  • Build dashboards on top of that
Once data is centralized, you can use different analytics tools depending on your needs. If a tool becomes too expensive or disappears: you swap the tool — not the entire architecture.

This approach is generally more flexible and less expensive over the long term.

💡 Summary

An ERP is excellent for managing operations.

But for long-term analytics, the most solid strategy is usually to separate your operational systems from your reporting layer.

Concretely, this means:

  • Extract data from your ERP, CRM, e-commerce platform, etc.
  • Store it in a centralized layer: a data warehouse (Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, Snowflake) or a lakehouse (Microsoft Fabric, Databricks)
  • Build your dashboards on top using a dedicated BI tool: Power BI, Tableau, Looker

Even a simpler setup works: Excel or CSV files consolidated in SharePoint or OneDrive, connected to Power BI. The key is the separation between the source system and the reporting layer.

👉 Centralize data, not dashboards.

Tools change. Data stays.