Enabling Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Using Embedded BI Countants Follow Jan 9 · 6 min read

Call it Embedded Analytics or Embedded BI, embedded technologies are here to stay and provide us with better data insights. As we arrive in 2020, embedded BI solutions are being increasingly adopted by businesses looking to adapt to the benefits of digital transformation.

Be its impact on front-ending the customer experience or powering the backend operation or its integration with third-party enterprise-level tools, embedded analytics can offer a lot to businesses.

A study conducted by Aberdeen Group reveals that 53% of BI solution providers are embedding analytics in their customized solutions. This capability is of particular utility to non-technical users as they no longer have to switch to an external tool for extracting BI-driven insights or visualizations. For instance, Embedded BI analytics-enabled global event management company, EEG Events Group to empower their clients with a post-event consolidated report reflecting the event performance and its business impact.

In the remaining sections, we shall look at how Embedded BI works with Enterprise Asset Management (or EAM) and how to go about integrating embedded BI and analytics with EAM.

What is Embedded BI?

According to the Gartner group, embedded analytic or embedded business intelligence is the use of analytics or BI within transactional applications. While the BI capabilities can be resident outside the native applications, what really matters in embedded analytics is that it can easily be accessed from any business application.

What does embedded BI analytics mean for any data or business analyst? They now can leverage BI capabilities or benefits directly from any business software without opening a separate user interface.

A classic example is that of the Power Bi Embedded tool from Microsoft. Embedded Power BI enables solution providers or developers to embed and provide access to quality BI reports and dashboards to users who do not even have a Power BI account.

So, what are some of the business benefits of embedded BI?

Reduces business costs as embedded BI solutions are more cost-effective than a standalone and independent BI solution. Businesses who have already invested in other business solutions can leverage their investments by integrating them with embedded analytics.

Faster data processing thanks to the seamless integration capabilities of embedded BI tools with other software tools. This can streamline data-related tasks within a single user interface.

Improves the overall productivity of data analysts as they do not have to switch between multiple applications and interfaces to complete their tasks. For example, by using embedded analytics with a CRM system, data analysts can generate the most updated sales report in a quick time.

In the following section, we shall look at the process of integrating embedded BI and analytics with the EAM system.

How Embedded BI Works With EAM

Short for Enterprise Asset Management, EAM technology is enabling better organizational control and management of its resources across locations and business divisions. These resources include:

Physical assets like machinery, manufacturing plants, and vehicles.

Technological assets like connected Internet-of-Things or IoT devices, operational applications, supply chains, and maintenance management systems.

Human assets like human resource management and employee productivity tools.

EAM tools and solutions like IBM Maximo are using artificial intelligence and embedded analytics to extend the lifecycles of their assets and reduce their maintenance costs. For instance, using connected IoT devices, this EAM tool enables data collection on a real-time basis and then use analytics tools to measure the availability and use of all assets.

While EAM tools can minimize costs and improve business value, embedded analytics can be used to identify new opportunities (for example, in equipment reallocation) in business operations.

How can you integrate Embedded BI with EAM? Let’s discuss this process.

Integrating Embedded BI With EAM

EAM tools like UpKeep allow enterprises to streamline their maintenance processes. As a data analyst, you can use the custom data reporting feature of UpKeep with various other applications. Additionally, by integrating an embedded BI and analytics tool like Power BI with this EAM tool, you can use Power BI to create visualizations of your large data reservoir.

Also positioned as a Computerized Maintenance Management System (or CMMS), here’s how you can integrate Embedded Power BI tool with the UpKeep EAM tool:

Log on to your UpKeep account and obtain a session token. Log on to your Power BI account and use the session token to configure an API call from UpKeep. In the next step, fetch the UpKeep collected data using the Power BI tool. Create customized Power BI dashboards powered by data gathered from UpKeep and other applications. Using UpKeep API in Power BI, connect the data flow across the software tools and database.

With these five steps, you have integrated the Power BI tool with the UpKeep EAM tool. Next, we shall see the value and benefits of integrating embedded BI and analytics with EAM.

How Does Embedded BI & Analytics Work For Better EAM?

How can embedded analytics work towards improving the EAM process? Here are three of the common trends in embedded analytics & BI that can benefit any business:

Integrates Data as a feature in any application

Be it EAM or any other process, applications are increasing their dependence on available business data. Embedded analytics seamlessly integrates data within any application and is delivered to data analysts when required.

Apart from faster data processing, data availability is crucial for the success of any EAM tool and works towards providing better and intuitive user experience.

Leverages data delivered from data science models

Building effective data science models is one thing but leveraging the findings of these models for business use is another challenge. Embedded analytics integrated with data science models can deliver data-driven insights smoothly to business users.

Embedded BI can take the output from data science models and share them through BI reports and visualizations that are embedded within a single application interface.

Works effectively with cloud-powered architectures

Businesses are increasingly deploying cloud-powered architectures that are lightweight and can be executed as microservices. For efficient cloud analytics, it’s unfeasible to integrate heavyweight BI applications into such architectures. As a result, BI service providers are deploying smaller BI microservices using embedded analytics.

In addition to these business benefits, business corporations can pursue multiple strategies to leverage maximum value from embedded analytics. These strategies include:

Cross-database reporting, which revolves around BI tools collecting data from multiple data sources including database systems like Microsoft Azure, MySQL, and Oracle.

Data preparation for better reporting, which makes use of analytics to gather, cleanse and organize the data retrieved from different systems. This strategy ensures that business users derive the most insights from the generated BI reports.

Securing data quality, which ensures that business executives can make decisions purely from good data. Data quality strategies eliminate any bad or unstructured data from the analytics process.

Providing data accessibility based on user roles, that prevents business users from accessing irrelevant data that fall outside their functional needs. Inefficient data accessibility can disrupt data analytics and cause compliance issues.

Creating a data-powered culture in the organization, through the use of embedded analytics that is considered the best mode of encouraging the adoption of data analytics. In short, embedded BI & analytics leverages the benefits of BI while keeping users within their application workflow.

Conclusion

With the easy availability of business data, any enterprise can collect and analyze this data for gaining insights and maximum competitive advantage. The emergence of embedded analytics allows business users to gain insights seamlessly while working on third-party applications including EAM.

With its expertise in cloud analytics and business intelligence, Countants is delivering value to customers looking to maximize their returns from investments in Google Analytics and other analytical tools.

Contact us now for a customized BI solution that can cater specifically to your business needs.