Insights

Decision making in uncertain times The power of Nectari for Sage 200 users

13th May 2021

4 min read

Author: Paolo Arcaneglo, Services Director, Datel

Reporting, analytics, BI, dashboards – there are so many terms to talk about the tools needed to get access to data but ultimately, it’s about making meaningful business decisions.

And over the last 12 months that has been more relevant than ever before. As business leaders, our decision-making skills have been put to the test and individuals and teams that have had real time information about the health of their business at multiple levels have been able to make more precise decisions in this uncertain world.

What’s clear is the uncertainty around us isn’t going away any time soon. But what can support decision making at every level is having the tools to access knowledge and understanding within your world to direct everything from strategy and innovation to day to day decisions at an operational level.

At Datel we have partnered with Tangerine Software to bring Sage 200 users a reporting and analytics platform that has been utilised by our Sage X3 support customers for over 10 years. Nectari (aka Sage Enterprise Intelligence) can now bring insight and knowledge to businesses with Sage 200 at the core of their operations.

Here are the top five reasons why Nectari should form part of your BI, reporting and analytics strategy in 2021:

1. You can continue to work in Excel

Excel is much loved and instrumental to decision makers across businesses with many creating cumbersome reports and downloading data from core systems. The challenge comes from how quickly data can be out of date, incomplete or full of errors. With the Nectari Excel add-in, the solution combines the robust capabilities of Excel with the power of Nectari.

You can access your data in real-time and eliminate the need to manually update worksheets with data from your ERP. Not only will you receive the most up-to-date information from your BI solution, but you’ll also be able to edit fields and push them back to the database. This means that you can continue to manage your budgets using Excel.

Here’s a few other things you can do with the Excel add-in: 

  • Use the formula wizard to create calculated fields.

  • Create flexible ad-hoc reports by combining data from different departments into a single worksheet.

  • Automatically extract dimensional data from Nectari Data Models to list in a column or row for fast report creation.

  • Set parameters on dimensions to help filter data used within formula calculations. Create pivot tables and slice and dice data.

  • Maintain the same level of security and user permissions as Nectari, with single sign-on.

The Nectari Excel Add-in can be installed and configured quickly and it integrates into the Microsoft Excel interface.

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2. It’s easy to use

Any BI tool is only as good as it’s users’ ability to get at the data they need, in the format they need it in to make decisions.  Nectari was created with the goal to empower all employees, technical and non-technical, and to remove the barrier of relying on IT to provide users with the reports they need to do their jobs.

With a few clicks, you can create and customise views for your specific requirements. Manipulate your enterprise data with easy-to-use features like filters, pivots, ranks and KPIs. Analyse your data in the most meaningful way, with over 100 visualisations and flexible reporting with advanced calculations and customisation options.

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3. Nectari comes with pre-set data models

Often, BI strategy is let down by the time it takes to build meaningful insight dashboards and reports that are specific to the decision makers needing access to the data. Serving as a central hub for all data sources, the Universal Data Models makes it easy to consolidate and access large amounts of data and turn that data into actionable insights for smarter business decisions.

Universal Data Models for Finance, Sales, Inventory and CRM provide hundreds of KPIs that adhere to reporting standards. Whether you use the predefined dashboards and reports (or choose to create your own) with the Universal Data Models, you’re equipped with everything you need to analyse your enterprise’s activities, performance, and profitability. The Universal Data Models require minimal set-up and can help boost your company’s performance from the day you start working with Nectari.

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4. You can collaborate with anyone you like

Decision making is often not a single person’s responsibility within a business, even at the highest levels, two heads are better than one. Nectari provides a suite of collaboration tools to help you share the right information with all internal and external stakeholders and aid effective decision making.

You can distribute reports to select recipients and determine what information each recipient will be able to access, so they only see what they need to. You can also annotate your reports before sharing, to draw attention to critical information. And with automatic distribution, you can get access to advanced features such as conditional alerts, data security, reporting packs, and more.

 

5. You can consolidate multi-company data

There are not many businesses that operate completely within one business system, especially in the Cloud based world we are in. Anyone that has multiple applications to manage operations or multiple businesses on different systems can be challenged by the lack of visibility across everything. As your business grows and evolves, so do your data management challenges.

For many businesses achieving clean and consolidated data can be costly and require a team of experts, hours of custom development, and infrastructure costs. Nectari DataSync can help you reduce the time and costs of additional labor and continue to make business decisions on data you can trust. Based on the extract, transform, load (ETL) process, Nectari DataSync is a data management and integration tool that can blend data from multiple sources and instances of Sage 200.  The result is your business wide data is in one place and ready to be analysed, reported on or facilitate decision making.

Nectari for Sage 200 is now available from Datel and our wealth of experience with the solution for our Sage X3 support customers will ensure you can implement a solid BI strategy, not just another reporting tool. To find out more, speak to your account manager, or get in touch to request a BI Strategy Session to discuss your requirements in detail with one of our BI experts.