Super Powering a Digital Supply Chain with Business Intelligence

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Harnessing the Power of BI for your Business

In today’s digital age, a critical reason why a business is successful depends on how effectively it is able to make use of resources. With the evolution of technologies, businesses today have access to hordes of data points. From point of sales machines to social media websites, businesses combine a variety of tools, means and channels to reach out to stakeholders to gain vital information. As it is, businesses have, access to a huge repository of data points that can lead them towards invaluable information regarding their business growth and sustainability.

It all started with the traditional management reporting tools. These tools slowly evolved and today the digital age has given birth to the much talked about space—business intelligence and analytics. Business intelligence makes sense of the sea of data for effective business use. It converts it into important information that management can use to understand their business, customers, employees and partners. Organizations have access to huge operational, strategic and tactical data at its disposal. Thanks to business intelligence, companies can feed in historical data and get insights on trends that predict markets, consumer behavior, compliance, inventory plans and much more. Thanks to business intelligence, companies can operate more efficiently, enhance their revenues and build a stronger connection among all partners and agencies.  Combining all this information, companies can mold their business plans and strategies to best come up with actions that can drive business towards profits and sustainability.

Pertaining to the supply chain, BI forms the crux of decision making. There are a number of factors that are driving companies to invest in highly advanced business intelligence and analytical tools.  Stringent policies, global complexities, lack of visibility, high competition, compliance and increased exposure to risk are just some of the many factors that are pushing businesses to employ highly advanced business intelligence to support their decisions, strategies and business. In order to run a successful supply chain operation, businesses need to clearly understand all factors that affect their top-line and bottom-line, supply chain being one of the most important ones. Business intelligence comes to the rescue in terms of helping managers analyze external and even internal information to build a supply chain that ultimately focuses on customer satisfaction, which is the ultimate goal of the business.

Using BI in supply chain and logistic operations can give unmatched advantages to your business and enable it to become adaptable and one step ahead in the digital world.

Business intelligence will help review your suppliers’ performance. Managing supplier base is a huge challenge. You need to ensure that your suppliers provide high quality raw material within budgets, within time and within set compliance standards. Reviewing them is a huge task and business intelligence can help you with it by providing detailed evaluation of vendor performance, quality and delivery.

The greatest advantage of business intelligence is that it presents complicated information in a manner which is easy to understand. Thanks to inbuilt dashboards, managers can get real time information of all that is taking place within the supply chain network. The dashboards help managers to pinpoint the problem areas and take corrective actions. Business intelligence helps managers to identify key partners, distribute work aptly, consolidate operations and improve asset utilization. Managers gain end-to-end visibility of the network and are able to ensure effective and seamless movement of material, manpower and information, enabling the creation of a connected, responsive and customer-oriented supply chain network.

Armed with business intelligence, managers gain visibility into events and activities that can be a hindrance to on-time delivery. Through case by case assessment, managers get access to information before-hand and this enables them create corrective measures to address late deliveries and also ensure that hiccups don’t occur in the future. Competitive analysis is another advantage that BI provides you. It gives your business the ability to assess what your peers are doing and how well you can refine your strategies to push your brand ahead in the race.

Capturing the power of Data

Thus, BI empowers your business to reach the next step by helping you take a thorough look at what is happening in your business and also what can happen. By gaining insights into how your supply chain analytics services works, managers are empowered to take business-informed decision and drill their strategies to achieve greater efficiencies, costs savings, and operational improvements.

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About the Author

Shwetha Singh, as a research and development blogger has more than 5 years of experience in writing blog posts that gives great insights to readers about the current trends in supply chain management solutions  sector. She tries to make the world just a bit more pleasant enough by working on strategies that would help them prevent and create more awareness on SCM. Connect to know more