Increase your Supply Chain IQ

The ability to effectively analyse and react to real-time information is a key skill for successful business managers throughout the supply chain. But how do you ensure you’re responding to the right data?

Not so long ago, corporate decisions were often based around analysing traditional reports from ERP software applications and making experienced guesses.

As business data systems continued to develop and grow, a new problem emerged: better and faster systems meant more data was created to fill the pipes. As a result, many organisations have been left feeling the pain of too much data and inconsistent information.

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Managers waste time every day trying to gain information about their business, says Mark Cockings, senior vice president, sales & marketing, for supply chain ERP software vendor IBS (International Business Systems).

“It’s quoted by a 2007 Accenture Report that over 50 percent of managers actually use the wrong information at least once a week,” says Cockings.

“That’s fine when it’s a day to day activity, but what about if that piece of information is a critical component of your business? And the decisions you make from that have a long term impact on how you operate it? And the interesting piece from that report is that over 50 percent of the information managers receive is perceived as having no value.”

According to Bengt Jensfelt, IBS’s business product manager for business intelligence, the more recent addition of key performance indicator (KPI) analysis tools and the integration of data warehouses containing ERP software information have allowed companies to create BI environments that provide greater insight for better and more accurate decision-making.

Integrating this information with companies’ strategic value processes, which include reviewing and analysing strategic goals and KPIs for business re-engineering, delivers a powerful solution for increasing operational efficiency, competitive advantage and overall profitability. These include industry-specific KPIs such as SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference) metrics for supply chain management. But he says a perception issue around the cost of BI remains.

“Organizations need solutions to address the enormous competitive pressures they are facing. BI and performance management software are the solutions that can deliver this, but are all too often perceived as too expensive and complex, suitable only for the budgets and resources of larger organizations.

This is no longer the case.”

While budget constraints can put pressure on IT departments, Jensfelt has six strategies aimed at ensuring a successful BI deployment and leveraging the return on an organisation’s BI investment:

• Take advantage of BI software that comes pre-loaded with several business applications that are ready-to-use and dedicated to your specific ERP system or other back office applications. The benefits are that project rollout can match resource capability and budget; business benefits are realised quickly; successful implementation provides justification for further investment; and rapid adjustments in response to changes in business objectives are possible.
• Ensure support for all reporting types – managed, ad-hoc, analytical, dashboards, production results, and operational or transactional. Not all organisations need all of these reports at once, but later growth and change will benefit from a pre-supported environment.
• Enable access anywhere, anytime, for a broad range of users. “Reports should be authored once, but published anywhere,” Jensfelt says.
• Open access to all data, regardless of source (back office applications, sales, purchase, general ledgers, warehouse, HR, etc), which means an open architecture is preferable so reports can access data wherever it resides.
• Optimise information delivery – best practice is one place to define data, a single query service to retrieve data, and one place to centrally manage the business rules. This means everyone works from the same data, query and business rules, giving greater confidence in the results.
• Ensure easy deployment and maintenance – using pre-defined processes, analyses and KPIs gives a ‘pre-configuration jump start’ to the implementation project by shortening the time required and reducing risk to ensure, as much as possible, a successful outcome.

Jensfelt says these strategies should ultimately help overburdened IT department in one of the key challenges they face today: harnessing data and turning it into useful information. “Successful business management is about consistent scrutiny and getting real-time information that allows companies to react to less than optimal performance. It also means getting quality business intelligence.”

For more information

IBS Australia
www.ibs.net/au
info@ibsaustralia.com

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