Organizations have made enormous investments in ERP applications like JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and SAP. These applications are highly optimized to manage the daily operations critical to their business. However, they are not optimized to share data with other systems, nor do they support sophisticated exploration of their data. At the same time, we have witnessed rapid advances in the capability of open source business intelligence (BI) tools. This poses the question; can open source BI be supplied to the ERP space?

This details an effort to unlock ERP data using open source tools. The demand for such methods is made clear in a recent study by Ventana Research. This study stated that 86% of organizations reported value from pre-built report templates for ERP and CRM applications. In this paper, two methods will be briefly explored: 1) report templates running over ERP application databases, and 2) the use of ETL to extract ERP data and load dimensional table structures.

There are pros and cons to using either the Report Templates over ERP application databases or the ETL extract and load of dimensional tables method. Table 1 lists a few examples of these pros and cons; a more detailed discussion is outside the scope of this white paper