News from MARC World: The intelligent solution
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/27/2005
Is your business getting smarter?
How you answer that question may depend on whether you’re asking the right questions upfront, or whether your decision support system, if you have one, is asking the right questions.
“Business intelligence is a buzz word in the supply chain software industry right now,” says Ronald Riggin, chief technology officer, MARC Global (866-703-8279). “But too many people think that business intelligence is a decision support system that helps them find answers to their problems.”
If you already know what your problems are, you can find a solution to them on your own, he adds.
True business intelligence, on the other hand “should help you find answers to questions about your business you didn’t know to ask. That’s where you’ll find the value.”
Riggin explained the difference between these two approaches to business intelligence at MARC World, its annual user conference.
Much of business intelligence and analytics today have focused on supply chain visibility and event management. These solutions alert a user when an order didn’t ship on time that a trailer is late or that a key performance indicator (KPI) has dropped below a threshold.
“This is all good stuff,” says Riggin. “But too often, these are after the fact alerts to historical statistics.”
Instead, Riggin believes users need predictive alerts that can identify a trend based on supply chain information, and then predict what will happen next if the trend continues.
An example might be that as the number of temporary workers goes up, the order fill rate goes down. “What that tells you is that even though you have more help, they’re making a lot more mistakes,” says Riggin. “The point is that the software can look at millions of transactions that happen every day in your execution systems and make correlations that you might not notice on your own.”
By integrating a business intelligence application with other supply chain and enterprise solutions, Riggin adds, a user can look at the results from a business value perspective.
“Most solutions measure what happened,” says Riggin. “What they’re not measuring is the business value of what happened.”
A traditional performance management solution might tell a warehouse manager that they picked 15 picks per hour instead of 20. The kind of solution MARC is offering can also look at the profitability of those picks.
“Picking 15 high margin products an hour might be more valuable to the company than 20 low margin picks,” says Riggin. “Business intelligence lets you form a point of view that goes beyond just counting.”
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