With today’s ever increasing clock-speed of business, there should be little question that the overall planning, execution and synchronization of supply chain operational processes and resources has become far more complex and demanding. Yet, it is becoming more essential.
Industry market change is constant, customers are more-demanding and risk or disruption is a constant threat. These past two months alone, we have called reader attention to the severe typhoon that impacted Taiwan and coastal China, the sudden de-value of China’s currency and the significant warehouse explosions occurred in Tianjin China. Global equity markets continue to react to deep concerns about China’s economic growth and export economy.
Supply chain business and operational intelligence is not solely about business reporting, but increasingly focused on the ongoing performance, uncovering hidden risk factors and synchronizing performance of the entire supply chain.
Supply chain teams thus require intelligence capabilities appropriately configured and tuned for analysis of root causes of bottlenecks or supply and demand shortfalls.
Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) technology has evolved from a termed vertical design principle that allows users the ability to compare plans with actual results. The architectural approach stemmed tapping centralized data warehouses, where business software applications feed their data and information.
However, the success and uptake of these traditional BI approaches has been frustrating since more than often, effective use or specialized intelligence needs require the direct assistance of IT. The ability to leverage hidden intelligence is often constrained because of the resource limitations of IT, or the complexity of the centralized information warehouse.
Newer, horizontal approaches anchored in data discovery and more de-centralized business process or predictive analytics concentration such as supply chain and product management have since made their presence in technology markets. The design principle of this approach is root cause analysis, to tap important data and information existing in specific applications such as supply chain planning, operational execution, fulfillment and product management applications. Their premise is to identify bottlenecks and provide early warning to operational process outliers and exceptions.
As one can imagine the fundamental determinant of termed horizontal BI user uptake and adoption rests with user friendliness and empowerment. It is about empowering business users to support more informed decision-making predicated on operational intelligence and appropriate business process context.
Major ERP vendors are caught in the middle of this changing paradigm. As an example, older version of SAP ERP supported information architecture that fed operational data and information to SAP Business Warehouse (BW), where either SAP or external BI applications tapped that data for general business reporting needs. The flexibility to hone-in on specific root cause and supply chain operational business process needs was limited to the innovation and resources of IT or system integrators. Such requirements often came with a high cost in terms of resources and time-to-value.
Responding to the compelling market changes outlined above where users require more user-friendly, self-service operational BI tools, SAP continues to evolve its overall approach to accommodate such needs. And there lies a growing tide of confusion. The stated migration from Business Objects BI, Crystal Reports, and now SAP Lumira has both IT and business functional teams confused as to which strategy to employ. Least we mention the other elephant in the room, that being SAP HANA, and its foundational relationship to leveraging data and information across the entire SAP landscape.
In the light of this product strategy confusion, innovative best-of-breed players have gained additional attention and deployments.
In a prior posting, we called Supply Chain Matters reader attention to Every Angle Software, which provides a self-service and operationally focused business intelligence tool designed to leverage information within SAP R3, SAP ECC, and SAP Business Suite environments. What impressed this author about Every Angle was not only its ability to add in-process logic and sophisticated calculations that adapt to an SAP operations management configuration, but customer testimonials testifying to the end-user friendliness of the software itself. The software comes with built-in adapters for SAP, includes hundreds of pre-configured templates and built-in, configurable business rules, and accommodates access by end-user device of choice including mobile devices. The software can be deployed for either on premise, cloud, or outsourced hosted needs.
Functional supply chain teams have a lot on their plate right now with little patience nor tolerance for having their IT teams figure out the long-term BI product strategy, architecture and functionality of a large ERP provider such as SAP. That is why many continue to opt towards filling-in such technology needs with experienced best-of-breed specialists.
If your team is experiencing such an operational BI challenge, you may want to check-out Every Angle Software.
Bob Ferrari
Disclosure: Every Angle Software is one of other sponsors of the Supply Chain Matters blog.
