Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain

Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain | Bold BI

Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain

Supply chain management plays a vital role in the emerging world market. According to the Harvard Business Review, in 2018, the U.S. supply chain made up 37 percent of all jobs, employing 44 million people in the U.S. To stay competitive in the supply chain management business, you need to recognize the potential weaknesses of your organization and form ideas to overcome them. Business intelligence (BI) helps you identify potential risks associated with your business and enables managers to take timely corrective action. BI gives you the required organization and visualization of the data stored in your business’s data banks needed for insight into its patterns. In this blog, I am going to discuss why supply chain management needs business intelligence and how BI paves the path to the growth of your business.

Why supply chain management needs BI

  1. BI helps key decision-makers monitor internal inefficiencies and gives them the metric-driven insight to take appropriate actions to overcome these inefficiencies.
  2. BI tools, such as scorecards and dashboards, provide detailed breakdowns of reports on your company’s performance with many available metrics and KPIs. These help you monitor the progress of your company growth, like whether quarterly goals are achieved or not, as well as forecast future results based on your previous performance data.
  3. Since supply chain management involves many departments, there is a lack of visibility and lots of data spread across the departments. BI collects all of your company’s data into a single platform.
  4. With the detailed and specific data from every step of production, you can go through the process from transporting raw materials to delivering your final products to customers and strategically enhance each part.

Various aspects of BI in supply chain management

The supply chain comprises various elements, such as operations management, logistics, procurement, and IT. It acts like the wheels of a vehicle. If anyone of them fails, the entire vehicle cannot move. BI coordinate each aspect with the others and helps you to run a more successful business.

  1. Demand and inventory management
  2. Distribution and communication management
  3. Supplier and vendor association
  4. Forecasting

Bold BI’s business intelligence dashboards for supply chain management

With Bold BI’s supply chain management dashboards, you can achieve the objectives of your company by tracking the important KPIs (such as cash-to-cycle time, perfect order rate, customer order cycle time, inventory turnover), drilling down into the key metrics with a detailed analysis in every widget, and identifying the risks in your process and mitigating those risks with action plans.

Read more at Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain

Leave your comments below and subscribe us to get more updates.

Technology’s Role in Managing the Evolution of the Customer Centric Supply Chain

Having an effective supply chain has always been key to retail success. Whether you call it micro-merchandising or the customer-centric supply chain, the challenge has traditionally been to quickly identify trends or activity in a store that is outperforming the norm, and rapidly roll this out to all stores with similar attributes and customer behaviours. Indeed, much of the ‘flair’ that separated well- from poorly performing retail operators was down to the ability of some key individuals to spot trends, clusters and patterns that drove better understanding of customer behaviour, and act upon these insights to deliver to customers’ demands.

This macro-level insight is, however, no longer good enough. Today, retailers need to be able to understand not only how items are performing across the entire retail estate as well as within individual stores and spot trends and patterns accordingly; they also need to be able to marry this micro-level performance to geographic and demographic information to reflect the demand from a particular store’s customers. And, they need to be able to forecast how those same items will be performing in weeks and months to come.

This is the capability that is required to truly deliver today’s customer-centric supply chain. But it demands a level of detail simply too difficult for humans to manage. Software solutions are designed to raise the average performance level by helping the poor or below average operators benefit from the expertise of the higher performers and placing this supporting technology in the hands of those key individuals who would act as district or regional manager.

But the needs of today’s customer-centric supply chain have outpaced even the majority of these solutions.

Read more Technology’s Role in Managing the Evolution of the Customer Centric Supply Chain

Subscribe us to get updates in your inbox, and if you have any questions, share it below in the comment box.

Overcoming 5 Major Supply Chain Challenges with Big Data Analytics

Big data analytics can help increase visibility and provide deeper insights into the supply chain. Leveraging big data, supply chain organizations can improve the way they respond to volatile demand or supply chain risk–and reduce concerns related to the issues.

Sixty-four percent of supply chain executives consider big data analytics a disruptive and important technology, setting the foundation for long-term change management in their organizations (Source: SCM World). Ninety-seven percent of supply chain executives report having an understanding of how big data analytics can benefit their supply chain. But, only 17 percent report having already implemented analytics in one or more supply chain functions (Source: Accenture).

Even if your organization is among the 83 percent who have yet to leverage big data analytics for supply chain management, you’re probably at least aware that mastering big data analytics will be a key enabler for supply chain and procurement executives in the years to come.

Big data enables you to quickly model massive volumes of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. For supply chain management, this can help increase visibility and provide deeper insights into the entire supply chain. Leveraging big data, your supply chain organizations can improve your response to volatile demand or supply chain risk, for example, and reduce the concerns related to the issue at hand. It will also be crucial for you to evolve your role from transactional facilitator to trusted business advisor.

Read more at Overcoming 5 Major Supply Chain Challenges with Big Data Analytics

What do you think about this article? Share your opinions with us in the comment box.