Supply Chain Business Intelligence Technologies, Issues and Trends

We cannot all help but notice the steady decline in our market share for the past consecutive 11 quarters. Annual revenue has shrunk by 40% since we last saw a sales growth. Despite all the cost cutting measures that we have implemented we still continue to see a steep decline in sales. To make matters worse we do not know why, we do not know how and do not have any insight on what the competition is doing and how they are doing it. I’m proposing that we adopt a business intelligence system. This will allow us to see the state of our overall processes, and pinpoint areas of improvement or elimination. In short, business intelligence will allow us to better analyze the organization’s plans and results. I will provide us with insight into what is working correctly at the same time identifying potential problem areas

Supply chain management (SCM) is the efficient management of the flows of material, data, and money in the supply chain. SCM software concentrates on improving decision making, forecasting, optimization, and analysis. The benefits of SCM have long been recognized in business, government, and the military. In today’s competitive business environment, efficient, effective supply chains are critical to survival and fully dependent on SCM software, which depends on up-to-date and accurate data. If the network goes down or data are outdated, those managing the supply chain are mostly working

In recent years, the importance management of supply chain has been a popular topic for a discussion and debates especially among the researchers, academician and practitioners. Still, the literature on supply chain management (SCM) especially in exploring the supply chain performance measurement is very limited. This limitation is due to the affected (in return) by many aspects of the firm’s environment and operations. The lack of investigation on understanding the supply chain measurement will affect the objectives and motivations of several supply chain concept even though there is a lot of literature on number of conceptual frameworks, discussion on characteristics, hierarchy and structure of performance measurement framework.

Supply Chain Management involves the process of managing, monitoring, controlling and constantly coordinating supply related activities among manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailer and the consumers. All this is done while integrating supply management with demand management, not only within but also across companies. Since all the processes involved in managing supply chain activities require a robust system in place, every company turns to technology for efficient and effective synchronization and smooth deployment of processes along with careful alignment of resources for timely completion of supply related activities.

Business intelligence can provide companies with accurate data that can be analyzed to support business strategy therefore enabling companies to better predict effectiveness of their business goals and ultimately result in a business profit. “Business intelligence is already in use in many organizations today, by finance departments to analyze financial performance, sales and marketing to identify customer trends, and operations to enhance the efficiency of supply chains. Using real data helps them answer who, what, where, why and when of related performance” (Rylander,2009).

A data warehouse and business intelligence application was created as part of the Orion Sword Group project providing business intelligence to order and supply chain management to users. I worked as part of a group of four students to implement a solution. This report reflects on the process undertaken to design and implement the solution as well as my experience and positive learning outcome.

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-based procedure for analysing data and giving decision based information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions. BI comprises a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from different sources such as internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, analytic dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers. Simply put, Business Intelligence is technology process that assists in the conversion of raw data into meaningful information. It helps you analyse the past and come up with the strategy to improve the future. When organizations carry out their day- to -day operation, raw data is generated and mostly stored in a database .This data needs to be analysed and meaningful information extracted from it. Based on this output, come up with future strategy that will grow the company. Making future decisions directly from raw data is impossible as a result there is need for the data to be converted into meaningful data. Management makes use of this information to take fact based decision that will result to a better future. The data used for Business Intelligence analysis comes from OLTP (Online transaction processing).These are daily transaction that takes place

Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) has been used as an umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based decision support systems. BI also includes the underlying architectures, tools, databases, applications, and methodologies. BI’s major objectives are to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and provide business managers and analysts the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform the actions [Turban et al. 2008; Wixom et al. 2011]. Successful BI initiatives have been reported for major industries, from healthcare and airlines, to major IT and telecommunication firms [Anderson-Lehman et al. 2004; Carte et al. 2005; Turban et al. 2008].

Information is the base to which supply chain decisions are made (Chopra & Meindl, 2010) making it imperative to performance (Forslund & Jonsson, 2007). As the key supply chain driver (Tippins & Sohi, 2004) it utilises other drivers to create an integrated, coordinated chain. Information alone does not guarantee success (Moberg, et al., 2002); reliability and validity are amongst the key fundamentals, defined in Table 1.1.

Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) has been used as an umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based decision support systems. BI also includes the underlying architectures, tools, databases, applications, and methodologies. BI’s major objectives are to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and provide business managers and analysts the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform the actions [Turban et al. 2008; Wixom et al. 2011]. Successful BI initiatives have been reported for major industries, from healthcare and airlines, to major IT and telecommunication firms [Anderson-Lehman et al. 2004; Carte et al. 2005; Turban et al. 2008].

Supply chain management is a valuable practice whose purpose is to offer businesses a competitive advantage in the market place. According to Jacoby, D. (2010), some companies like Walmart and Dell have applied this system to gain a competitive advantage in the market while others have failed to apply it owing to its complexity. Companies require adequate and accurate information about all the players in the chain management in order for them to meet their consumers, demands while maintaining health relationships with their suppliers. Technology plays a pivotal role in availing such information, and as such, it is an effective tool for chain management. If done in the right way, then organizations will be ahead of the rest of the competitors in the market place. It is for this reason that organizations should invest in proper supply chain management in order for them to enhance their revenues while cutting on the costs.

Supply chain management, then, is the active management of supply chain activities to maximize customer value and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. It represents a conscious effort by the supply chain firms to develop and run supply chains in the most effective & efficient ways possible. Supply chain activities cover everything from product development, sourcing, production, and logistics, as well as the information systems needed to coordinate these activities.

Supply chain management is currently an important aspect in Management Information System. So much technology and brainpower have been used to improve the performance. In this decade electronic data interchange has made the process flexible, automatic warehousing and rapid logistics. Every organizations are trying to make their supply chain management more accurate using quick response, efficient customer response, mass customization, lean and agile manufacturing. (Fisher, 1997)

Links between supply chain and CRM processes are critical. Business leads, technology follows. But the

Improvements in transportation process and technology enablement make available the most achievable way for most companies today to flush out supply chain costs and advance quality, reliability and customer satisfaction. Companies across nearly every industry sector are motivated to become supply chain management leaders. SCM leaders attain this rank in their markets by extensively dropping cycle times and operating expenses, increasing supply chain