An important factor, which is most often overlooked within the supply chain, is the value that information and data can provide to optimize workflow and supply chain management. Real-time and on-demand information systems are important if organizations want to have optimal business intelligence (BI), so as to gain competitive advantage.
According to Keith Jones, MD of Harvey Jones Systems, the retail and supply chain sector is ripe for real-time BI.
Says Jones: ?Real-time business intelligence is the next big wave driving BI, and it will have a major impact on retail and supply chain industries, where competition is fierce, and the dynamics are extreme.?
Traditional BI has been good at solving many of the management information issues prevalent in the past, says Jones, however, management was missing a vital link in the decision-making process. ?BI could accurately highlight what had happened, but did not have the capability to look at what was happening right now,? he adds.
Jones says there are numerous source transactional systems, collecting and providing up-to-the-minute data in many different formats to business users. They cover points of sale, stock, warehousing, financials, customer relationship management, supply chain and logistics, route planning, and load optimization. However, getting an up-to-date, holistic view of the business, across all of these transactional systems is not easy, and determining the impact of trends and actions is harder still.
The operational resources in the different business silos are unlikely to have a need for real-time BI, and simple reporting and query tools are sufficient in these environments. However, understanding consumer spending and habits, gathering competitive intelligence, and performing impact analysis allows the organization to be proactive and address problems as they arise. Nothing can be done to fix performance after the fact.
Says Jones: ?In environments as competitive as retail and supply chain, reducing information latency is the key to competing successfully. Real-time BI provides the ability to access data from multiple platforms in multiple formats, collate it, and present it to business users in a format that they can understand. It provides an instant logical view of the business rather than a physical view of the data.?
According to Jones, real-time BI will deliver value, not in answering the question ?What is going on?, but answering ?What is the impact likely to be??
The life span of information in real-time BI is much shorter than that of the traditional information on trends, as its value erodes much faster. Unless the information is acted on immediately, and the business processes and culture encourage this action, then the benefits of real-time BI are limited.
The retail and supply chain markets are complex, and any information advantage that companies can gleam should translate into returns. The longer an organization is able to maintain its advantage, the greater these returns are likely to be.
Independent supply chain services company, Volition, believes that BI is a crucial component in effective distribution management. The company notes that more and more organizations are recognizing the need for continuous process performance measurement and management.
Volition says that, in recent years, a number of systems have entered this market to assist in automating manual processes (route scheduling software) as well as control execution (vehicle management and tracking). Whilst these technologies greatly improve an organization"s ability to measure activity and collect data, Volition adds, in many instances these systems are stand-alone, and do not support a holistic, integrated approach to performance management.
The company claims, therefore, that it is key that organizations take an integrated, value chain-wide view of information, through the appropriate use of BI techniques, but should not focus so much on the selection of BI technologies, but rather the correct identification of indicators - so as to ensure that cost drivers are measured and managed before they result in unnecessary costs.
To achieve effective distribution performance management, notes Volition, one needs a combination of real-time and after-the-fact intelligence, based on the measurement of key performance indicators within the distribution process.
The company further notes that the successful measurement of these indicators inevitably requires the integration of information from different sources, including planning, routing, tracking and ERP systems.
Volition advises that, by implementing basic BI solutions, organizations can effectively consolidate and analyze information, thereby achieving integrated performance management, and, ultimately, synergy across the supply chain.