Supply Chain Business Intelligence: A Nascent Concept
Supply chain business intelligence (BI), still in its infancy, has numerous challenges ahead of it. Most BI platforms and supply chain management applications don’t capture and address the intricacies of global supply chain networks. For reconciling dissimilar data points, establishing a common reference model and providing decision makers with meaningful, robust and forward-looking metrics, what is needed is complex and well as complicated solution platforms. This offers even more challenges for supply chain business intelligence vendors.
Thus, decision makers or businesses need to augment their BI tools and platforms with complementary and supplementary tools to improvise on the growing complexity of managing supply chain performance. The impact of the growing demand for supply chain business intelligence is evident on both end of the spectrum. Be it the supply chain management application vendors or the business intelligence platform vendors, both are facing the challenge to address the demand of a hybrid product.
Many a leading firms have made considerable progress to this end. Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle (PeopleSoft EPM) and SAP nowadays embed prepackaged supply chain-centric analytical applications. Cognos offers distributed decision-making support with business event management alerts, while Hyperion provides master data management services.
But, there are areas where a lot needs to be achieved. One of them is integration of BI platform with trading partner visibility platforms. Until now no BI vendor supports trading partner visibility and detailed supply and demand scenario planning. What this essentially means is the integration of trading partner data and the mixing of planning information with transaction information.
To be one up on supply chain business intelligence, supply chain managers must evaluate their Supply chain BI needs, with the aim to identify and prioritize them. The starting point could be scoping out the business goals of the BI initiative and then taking it forward from there.
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