Cloud Data Warehouse Modernization for Finance Analytics: Leveraging Finance KPIs

Like many other executives today, CFOs and finance officers are trying to make data-driven decisions to steer their businesses. These finance leaders rely on analytics insights derived from a wide range of data sources (including systems such as ERP, CRM, HR, and more) and finance KPIs (such as cash flow, revenue, and liquidity ratios). How can they wrangle a multitude of data sources and make sure they can access high-quality trusted data for business decision-making? For many organizations, the answer is a modern cloud data warehouse that enables faster, easier access to trusted data for finance analytics. The right finance analytics solution can help accelerate your time to value from cloud data warehouse modernization initiatives—and help your finance leaders access the data they need to make better business decisions.  

8 Key Capabilities of a Finance Analytics Solution

What does a modern, cloud-based finance analytics solution look like? Here are eight key capabilities to look for. Your solution should:

• Ensure seamless integration with a wide variety of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, helping to significantly reduce analysis efforts
• Enable self-service access for IT or finance teams to integrate with ERP or CRM with a codeless interface without having to understand API-level details (this capability reduces resource constraints for IT staff and maximizes efficiency, especially with a comprehensive, intelligent integration solution that includes built-in ETL templates and drag and drop wizards to extract relevant data for analytics)
• Leverage open-standard cloud-native technology to easily manage and scale workloads to meet customer demands
• Deliver trusted and clean data to meet pre-defined finance KPIs for corporate finance and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) requirements
• Leverage AI-powered intelligent recommendations to build end-to-end data pipelines, optimize performance, and process complex integrations jobs using a best-of-breed engine for cloud ETL and ELT
• Deliver self-service dashboards for both operational and leadership teams to accelerate time to insight
• Protect your investments with a “Bring your own License” model – where you can use your existing license and maximize ETL investments in your data warehouse with pre-built dashboards in standard visualization platforms like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI
• Have the flexibility to deploy the solution on any cloud, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure

Business Benefits of a Pre-Built Finance Cloud Data Warehouse

For some organizations, a pre-built finance cloud data warehouse accelerates the migration of a legacy data warehouse solution to cloud or helps consolidate multiple ETL and ELT platforms or visualization platforms into one. With advances in cloud data integration platforms, pre-built data warehouse solutions provide out-of-box connectivity to many ERP and CRM solutions and also provide industry standard KPIs for finance analytics.

Four key benefits of a pre-built finance data warehouse are:

Agility & Elasticity

With a pre-built finance data warehouse, your finance team will have access to industry standard KPIs and be able to quickly deliver trusted metrics for changing business needs. The solution should include standard modules and finance KPIs, including revenue, CapEx, OpEx, fixed assets, liquidity analysis, income, profitability analysis, and more across multiple entities or subsidiaries. 

Cost

A pre-built solution can significantly lower cost compared to owning legacy implementations or building a data warehouse from scratch along with ongoing maintenance.

Complexity

Pre-built data warehouse solutions are built using industry-standard best practices, including native connectivity with ERP and CRM applications to deliver well-defined KPIs, reducing overall complexity of implementation and helping customers standardize business metrics across the organization.

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 allows discovery and assesses financial risk to customer’s business while developing a mitigation plan. In addition, the solution future-proofs your business by developing portable artifacts.

Take a New Approach to a Finance Cloud Data Warehouse

Informatica partner Infometry has developed a solution for finance cloud data warehousing. This new approach to a finance cloud data warehouse is built on Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform, which includes Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Cloud Mass Ingestion, and Cloud Application Integration services and 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.   

InfoFiscus – a pre-packaged finance analytics solution from Infometry – leverages Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud IDMC and Snowflake Data Cloud. The solution supports all three analytics platforms (Tableau Online, Looker, and Power BI). The pre-packaged solution is represented with the following architecture.

Customers can leverage highly configurable ETL mappings to extract data from ERP systems like NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Fusion, SAP, and more to a pre-built finance data warehouse on Snowflake Data Cloud. Customers can then pick the cloud analytics platform of their choice such as Tableau Online, Looker, or Microsoft Power BI to deploy finance dashboards.

To learn more, please check out the InfoFiscus website.