Supply Chain, Risk, and BI Management
Greetings:
In response to colleagues request and market demand for SCM, BI, and Risk, I am initiating a lecture (posting) series under the title of:
“Risk, and Business Intelligence in the context of Supply and Demand Chain Management.”
For the first week, I decided to start with the most commonly accepted definition of these acronyms from Wikipedia. Any contribution in this department is welcomed. I invite all of you for contribution and feedback. The plan is to have 12 postings on the subject matter by December of 2011.
“Risk and Business Intelligence in the Context of Supply and Demand Chain Management”
Definition I:
Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996).[2] Supply chain management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).
Another definition is provided by the APICS Dictionary when it defines SCM as the “design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally.”
Definition II:
Business intelligence (BI) mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting,[clarification needed] and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.[1]
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics.
Business intelligence aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).[2] Though the term business intelligence is sometimes used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. Business intelligence understood broadly can include the subset of competitive intelligence.[3]
Definition II:
Risk is the potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss (an undesirable outcome). The notion implies that a choice having an influence on the outcome exists (or existed). Potential losses themselves may also be called “risks”. Almost any human endeavor carries some risk, but some are much more risky than others.
