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With supply chain business intelligence (BI), you can:

Though substantial improvements in supply/demand chain management have been made over the years, many opportunities for additional gains still remain. Advances in real-time alerts and supply chain portals/extranets are delivering the next generation of supply chain excellence and fast-payback return on investment (ROI).

By using the Web and electronic forms with customers, sales people, and brokers, you will increase the accuracy of orders. This not only improves your overall forecasts so that inventory can be reduced, but also improves invoicing and deduction management to further reduce your costs while increasing your customer satisfaction.

Additionally, the use of a BI extranet (Web portal) enables customers to order and track order status with real-time alerts about performance exceptions. It also helps you cut costs for customer service inquiries and enhance the perception of superior customer service.

Put simply, BI helps your supply chain work smarter.

Portals for Suppliers
Do you get better performance from your key suppliers than your competitors do? Generally, firms that do are very good at measuring supplier performance on order fill, on-time delivery, quality, new product development support, and other metrics.

With such performance measures, suppliers can see how and where to improve performance. And by giving suppliers knowledge of where they stand compared to other suppliers, and periodically reapportioning orders according to performance, everyone can enhance performance.

The use of portals also reduces procurement costs. How? By enabling streamlining of procurement processes and ensuring accurate communication of orders and shipping requirements.

And by requiring suppliers to input order and shipment status, you can give your organization visibility to orders in process and shipments en route, thus enabling a reduction in safety stock on raw materials and components.

Portals to Customers
Just as you want your suppliers to link to you via the Web to improve performance and visibility, sophisticated retail customers want you to link to them. They also want:

With BI, you can give them everything they want. BI enables efficient creation and maintenance of electronic online ordering, status inventory, alerts, and collaborative planning-and connects everything over a portal.

Transportation Cost Reduction
A majority of supply chain costs comes from transportation costs. With BI, you can create a smarter supply chain and reduce these costs.

BI enables savings through transportation route analyses, transportation optimization, and collaborative transportation management. You can identify more opportunities to consolidate shipments and increase carrier competition for routes by negotiating with carriers from a position of knowledge, reducing deadheading, and changing less than truckload (LTL) into more efficient, full-truckload shipments.

In addition, by modeling the network of suppliers, production plants, warehouses, and customer locations, you can identify shipment consolidation points and transportation routes that generate further savings. And as customer needs evolve, you can better identify locations for warehouses and plants.

Some Interesting Uses of Business Intelligence

Ben & Jerry's, a unit of $47-billion-a-year Unilever, tracks the ingredients and life of each pint in an Oracle database and with BI from Business Objects. If a consumer calls in with a complaint, the consumer affairs staff matches up the pint with which supplier's milk, eggs, or cherries, etc. didn't meet the organization's near-obsession with quality.

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