Tag Archives: Data

How Do You Turn Supply Chain Data into Actionable Information?

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How Do You Turn Supply Chain Data into Actionable Information?

There is a continuum in terms of presentation of data that allows for continuous sophistication in understanding and interpreting data. There are lots of ways to view data, but three that are particularly useful in supply-chain analytics are –Reporting, Scorecarding, and Benchmarking.

The simplest form of looking at data is what we have all seen dozens of times, we call it “Reporting”. Back in the day, reporting was numbers printed out on green bar paper, but today’s business intelligence reports are far more detailed and dynamic than in the past. For instance, a BI report of today displays all the data about transportation providers as usable information, in a scorecard format. Factors such as on-time delivery, freight cost per unit shipped, and transit time are assigned metrics and weighted averages to help users determine how well carriers are performing overall.

Operation managers and executives who want a quick, daily overview of what is happening in their transportation or supply chain network use dashboards to provide information in near real-time to help users understand what is happening within their network, and allows them to make proactive decisions to remedy problems as they occur. Where reporting is really like looking in the rearview mirror, dashboards are used to see what’s going on now, and makes it easier for users to identify trends and exceptions, and to intervene before something goes wrong.

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Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market

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Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market

Box and Roambi just announced a partnership that is both old fashioned and empowering, and may be an accelerator for companies struggling to expand the use of data without creating a mess.

Spreadsheets are at the core of the Top of the Funnel BI challenge that companies all over the world have faced for decades. The challenge defined by TOFU BI (as I’ve discussed in “Why Top of the Funnel BI Will Drive the Next Wave of Adoption”) is how do you get everyone in the enterprise using data to maximum effect.

… the point of this partnership is to keep the wildly popular paradigm of self-service spreadsheets and add a delivery mechanism created for the modern, mobile world. Both Box and Roambi are well suited to solve parts of the problem and work together. Box acts as the repository that helps control the sprawl of hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets and makes them manageable. Roambi Analytics extracts data from spreadsheets and other sources and creates attractive dashboards or e-books (in the Roambi Flow product) that present data in an attractive way. …

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2013 in review: Big data, bigger expectations?

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In the parlance of the industry, big data’s feat was a result of the successful convergence of the “three Vs”:

Volume: A large amount of data

Variety: A wide range of data types and sources

Velocity: The speed of data moving from its sources, into the hands of those who need it

Although other Vs have since been contemplated, such as Veracity and Value, the original three attributes promised big data could go far beyond the boundaries of traditional databases, which require data to be stored in rigid rows and columns.

However, over the past year, reality began to sink in: People came to realize what big data could and could not do. Unfortunately, performing large-scale analytics in real time proved to be more daunting than originally thought. Although Hadoop continues to be the world’s most popular big data processing platform, it was designed for batch processing and is far too slow for real-time use.

Reference: 2013 in review: Big data, bigger expectations?

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