From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs: Unlocking Enterprise Insights While Controlling Costs

What if the data platform you bought to give everyone access to insights is actually doing the opposite? And what if, instead of starting over, you could unlock its full potential, amplify performance, and drive the outcomes you had hoped for in the first place?

SAP sits at the heart of most large enterprises as a CRM, data platform, ERP and more, managing everything from finance to supply chain. However, while it excels at organizing transactional data, it falls short on advanced analytics, often resulting in reporting delays, fragmented visibility, data silos, and heavy IT dependence for basic insights.

In a fast-moving economy where organizations must have strong data governance practices and consistent data quality, while allowing their teams to make sharper decisions with more data and fewer resources, the ability to quickly turn that data into actionable intelligence through data analytics is no longer optional, it’s a competitive requirement.

Forward-thinking organizations are reimagining how to extract the value of data from legacy systems to build flexible, high-performance architectures that enable intelligent decision-making and broaden data democratization across the enterprise. insightsoftware, a global provider of financial, accounting, and operational analytics, offers solutions that help companies transform critical SAP data sources into actionable insights, tackling this challenge head-on—offering key lessons for transforming data into a true business asset.

insightsoftware noticed this complexity was limiting its agility. Its Angles for SAP solution needed a powerful backend to process and deliver timely insights to customers. However, its legacy architecture not only struggled with scale, but suffered from inconsistent query performance, and the company faced a rising total cost of ownership (TCO) as its data and customer base grew. While traditional cloud data warehouse options offered some relief, they also introduced cost unpredictability as data volumes surged.

A New Approach to Real-Time Business Insight

The tipping point for insightsoftware came when it re-evaluated its data infrastructure and realized it needed a modern platform optimized for cost-effective performance—a platform that provided seamless access to SAP data, enabled predictive analytics and flexible reporting at scale, without overwhelming IT or driving up costs, allowing the company to grow without financial strain.

The solution was to keep SAP for what it excels at, and leverage a high-performance cloud data warehouse to ingest, store, query and analyze data, improving responsiveness across financial and supply chain functions with this augmentation approach. The result: better forecasting, improved visibility, and a more scalable foundation for growth.

The insightsoftware experience provides valuable lessons for turning data complexity into analytics:

Let End Users Self Serve Themselves
End users shouldn’t have to wait on IT to run reports or interpret performance metrics. With self-service analytics, users can access business intelligence and critical insights on demand, enhancing speed, trust, and accountability in the decision-making process.
Bring the Data Core into the Modern Age
Moving from legacy systems to scalable, performance-optimized cloud architectures doesn’t just improve efficiency—it unlocks new business capabilities. With the right infrastructure, organizations can handle multi-terabyte datasets or larger, support thousands of concurrent users, and scale without proportionate cost increases.
Break Down the Wall Between Finance and Operations
Aligning financial plans with real-time data from procurement, production, and sales functions avoids costly blind spots and allows organizations to adjust forecasts in response to market signals.

When an organization factors these principles into its data management and analytics strategy, the impact can be transformative.

Since implementing a high-performance cloud data warehouse, insightsoftware customers report that:

Time spent on financial reporting dropped by 40%
Forecasting accuracy rose by 35% compared to legacy SAP tools
Onboarding of new customers increased 12-fold—without raising infrastructure costs
Data warehouse TCO dropped by 50%, improving profitability and predictability.

And last but not least, customer satisfaction soared.

Looking Ahead: Data as a Strategic Asset

As business moves faster than ever, data can’t just be seen as an asset, but as the backbone of every decision. That means letting go of outdated systems, augmenting data infrastructure, investing in modern tools, and making sure teams have what they need to make clear insights, timely, and actionable.

Whether it’s finance, operations, or supply chain, being able to forecast confidently—and pivot quickly—is no longer a luxury. It’s essential for growth.

To learn more about unlocking enterprise insights while controlling costs with Yellowbrick visit the website here.

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