Overcoming Data Silos in Manufacturing ERPs
For operations directors and manufacturing leaders, relying on manual spreadsheets to assemble reports from different departments is a persistent workflow bottleneck. Disconnected data across sales, production, purchasing, and warehouse operations makes it difficult to gain real-time visibility into business performance. Highlighting a growing industry focus on solving this issue, a late October 2026 report notes that Forterro has expanded access to TARGIT business intelligence (BI) for its European ERP customer base. This move aims to provide industrial businesses with pre-defined analytics solutions that directly connect with their existing operations systems.
Evaluating Integrated Business Intelligence
When business intelligence operates independently from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, teams waste valuable time manually integrating data. By extending a dedicated BI platform alongside specialized manufacturing systems—as seen with Forterro customers using Abas and Orderwise—organizations can make cross-functional data immediately available for analysis. According to the source, integrating BI with production intelligence software can bring comprehensive analytics into a single software environment, whether deployed in the cloud or on-premises.
Before implementing a new BI solution or upgrading an existing ERP ecosystem, decision-makers should evaluate their current data infrastructure. Consider the following implementation prerequisites and evaluation questions:
- Data Integration Capabilities: Does the proposed BI tool offer pre-defined analytics that connect natively to your specific ERP modules, such as finance, purchasing, and warehouse operations?
- Deployment Flexibility: Can the analytics platform support your current IT infrastructure, whether that requires cloud or on-premises deployments?
- Workflow Consolidation: Will the solution demonstrably reduce the manual work required to assemble reports across different operational functions?
Aligning Data Intelligence with Your Operations
While the recent Forterro expansion offers a specific solution for its user base, the core requirement for seamlessly connected ERP and BI is universal across the manufacturing and supply chain sector. Evaluating how data flows through your organization is a critical first step. Organizations looking to improve their analytics can explore AI and data intelligence services to assess how best to integrate reporting tools with their existing systems, or when planning a new platform deployment such as Odoo ERP.
If your manufacturing or supply chain workflows are slowed down by disconnected data and manual reporting, a professional assessment can help outline your options. To discuss your specific operational challenges and explore practical technology strategies, reach out to the team at Decision Intelligent.