How to query your ERP in plain English and get answers in seconds

Here's a situation that happens in almost every company running an ERP system. A department head needs to know how much the business spent on a particular supplier last quarter. She knows the data is in the system. But to get it, she either has to navigate a reporting module she hasn't used in months, call someone in IT, or wait until the next scheduled report drops in her inbox.

The data exists. Getting to it doesn't.

This is the gap that Nova was built to close. Nova is an AI layer that sits on top of your existing ERP system and lets anyone in your organisation ask questions about business data in plain English, through a simple chat interface, and get accurate answers in seconds. No SQL. No ERP training. No IT ticket.

The problem Nova solves

ERP systems are excellent at storing and processing business data. Where they consistently fall short is in making that data accessible to the people who need it most, which is usually not the people who are technically skilled enough to extract it themselves.

Only 26% of employees use their company's ERP

Survey after survey on ERP usage arrives at roughly the same number: around a quarter of employees actively use their company's ERP system. The rest interact with it indirectly through reports someone else generated, data someone else exported, or summaries someone else prepared.

This underutilisation isn't a training problem or a culture problem. It's a design problem. ERP interfaces were built for technical users. They're dense, require knowledge of data structures, and reward people who spend a significant portion of their day in the system. For everyone else, they're effectively inaccessible.

The IT bottleneck that slows every decision

When employees can't get data from the ERP themselves, it flows through IT. Requests pile up, reports take days, and by the time the answer arrives, the context has changed. According to research, 92% of ERP systems require manual intervention just to share data between departments. The ERP is supposed to be a single source of truth for the whole organisation. In practice, it's a database that only a few people can read fluently.

Data trapped in silos, decisions made with guesswork

Because the ERP is hard to query, different departments build their own workarounds. Finance tracks actuals in spreadsheets. Operations maintains its own inventory logs. Sales works from CRM data that doesn't sync with ERP records. Each team is confident in its own numbers, but those numbers don't always match, and the business runs on contradictory information without always knowing it.

How Nova works

Nova is not a replacement for your ERP. It doesn't require a migration, a reimplementation, or a change to how your data is stored. It connects to your existing ERP, reads your data structure, and sits in front of it as a natural language interface.

Plain English questions, instant answers

Instead of navigating a reporting module, a user opens Nova and types a question. "What were our top five vendors by spend last month?" "Show me all purchase orders raised this week that haven't been approved yet." "Which product lines are below target for the quarter?" Nova interprets the question, generates the appropriate query against the ERP data, and returns the answer in a readable format, often with a table or summary, directly in the chat window.

The experience is closer to asking a well-informed colleague than to running a report. There's no need to know which module the data lives in, what the field names are, or how the filters work. You ask in the language you think in, and Nova handles the translation.

Works across ERP systems

Nova is ERP-agnostic. It's designed to connect to any ERP system, whether the company is running SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Tally, or a custom-built solution. The underlying architecture reads the data schema of the connected ERP and learns what data exists and how it's structured. This means companies don't need to be running a particular ERP to use Nova, and they don't need to migrate to a new system to get natural language query capability.

No IT involvement required for everyday queries

For day-to-day business questions, Nova removes IT from the loop entirely. A finance head who wants to check outstanding receivables doesn't raise a ticket. A plant manager who wants to see last week's production output doesn't wait for a report. The data is available when the question is asked, by the person asking it.

IT's role shifts from being a reporting service desk to managing access controls, reviewing query patterns, and ensuring data governance. That's a better use of their time, and it frees them from the backlog of data requests that currently sits between business teams and the information they need.

What changes when everyone can access ERP data

The compounding effect of giving everyone in an organisation access to real-time ERP data isn't just operational efficiency. It changes how decisions get made.

Faster decisions, closer to the data

When a sales head can see customer payment history and outstanding credit in real time, her conversations with customers change. When a procurement manager can check supplier performance data before a negotiation, his position changes. When a COO can compare actual vs. budget across every cost centre without waiting for month-end close, she spots problems earlier and responds faster. The quality of decisions goes up when the people making them have access to accurate, current information rather than last week's export.

One version of the truth, across every department

When all queries go through Nova to the same ERP data source, the organisation stops running on contradictory spreadsheets. Finance and operations are looking at the same inventory numbers. Sales and finance are working from the same revenue figures. The shadow data infrastructure that most mid-sized companies have built up over years starts to become unnecessary, because the original source of truth is now actually accessible.

ERP adoption goes up, training costs go down

One of the consistent frustrations of ERP implementations is that adoption never reaches the levels projected at go-live. Training is expensive, it doesn't stick for infrequent users, and the complexity of the interface defeats people who don't have a technical background. When the interface becomes a chat window, that barrier drops. Users don't need to know how to navigate the ERP. They need to know what question they want answered.

Who Nova is built for

Nova is built for any company that is already running an ERP system and finding that the data inside it isn't as accessible as it should be. That includes:

Finance teams who want real-time access to cash flow, receivables, payables, and budget variance without waiting for the monthly pack. Operations heads who need production, inventory, and procurement data without going through IT. COOs and CFOs who want to ask strategic questions about the business and get answers from the source of record, not from a summary someone prepared. IT directors who want to reduce the volume of data requests hitting their team and give business users genuine self-service capability.

If your organisation paid to implement an ERP and still finds that key business questions require an IT ticket to answer, Nova is worth a closer look.

Getting started

Nova connects to your existing ERP without requiring a migration or a new implementation. The setup process maps your ERP's data structure, configures the natural language layer, and validates query accuracy against your actual data before going live.