Those processes that were primarily considered to need to go against the data warehouse are now being moved back into operational systems themselves, or new systems are being established in operations. However, unlike previously, when ERP vendors were slow to acknowledge the need for anything beyond what they provided, ERPs today tend to work as members of an information ecosystem. It’s like back to the days before data warehousing, only this time with an operational environment increasingly able to keep up with corporate demands.

Today’s ERP environments are well aware of the real-time and up-to-date need for information and facilitate much of the analysis needed in three ways:
• By providing the analysis within the ERP system
• By flexibly allowing for data warehouse feeds
• By enabling enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII) for interchange with other operational systems and cross-system queries