The Supply Chain Information Technology blog

Last fall, I attended a review meeting to discuss a client’s options on upgrading or replacing their existing warehouse management system (WMS). During the session, someone mentioned the importance of factoring Business Intelligence (BI) into the equation and began to explain why the dashboard and reporting capabilities of any prospective solution should be considered.

This provoked an immediate reaction from a senior logistics VP, who said that he had heard this same song and dance before when his company’s current WMS was selected. And he has been waiting seven years and still does not have his dashboards.

Many organizations have an untapped wealth of supply chain performance data locked away in their systems. Executives and managers constantly clamor to get their hands on this information so that they can identify issues and trends in a timely manner.

Considerable efforts are spent developing a plethora of custom queries, reports, databases, and spread sheets to meet this demand. And they typically produce additional requests for even more performance data and metrics.

Supply chain executives and managers want information presented in a timely, concise manner; sifting through a variety of reports and spread sheets is impractical. They want to see trends and issues that matter to them presented in an actionable format. So, they tend to be very interested in getting tailored dashboards on their desktops and mobile devices.

Many companies pursue BI initiatives that seek to extract value from information locked away in databases across the enterprise. Some enterprises standardize on platforms from SAP, IBM, Oracle or other full BI solution providers.

These solutions provide tools to build data marts, perform analytical processing, and extract and disseminate performance and trend information. Other firms use BI modules and tools provided by their supply chain suite vendor to get actionable performance data into the hands of supply chain executives and managers.

These traditional BI solutions typically provide tools to develop and deploy dashboards. While they may provide some templates that are relevant to a particular supply chain operation, it is up to the enterprise using the tool to develop dashboards and reports that meet the specific needs of its supply chain user community.

This is why the plight of the aforementioned senior logistics VP is not uncommon. The platform can do the job. But from discovery to deployment, it takes a lot of resources to fully construct these solutions to meet the needs of every potential user in the enterprise.

I recently sat through demonstrations of two BI solutions that target special supply chain audiences: Blue Sky Logistics and Oco. Both vendors offer pre-built content that can be integrated with multiple data sources. Both deliver content through intuitive dashboards and reports.

Blue Sky offers a collection of more than 100 instrument panels that focus on performance data primarily inside the warehouse. Their solution employs a proprietary data model that is fed by client transactional systems. It is typically deployed on-premise. Blue Sky provides professional services to support the integration of client data sources to their data mart.

Oco offers a SaaS BI solution that provides pre-built analytics that focus on inventory, transportation and procurement. Customers typically feed Oco’s cloud-based data warehouse on a daily basis through a FTP upload. Oco provides a standard data exporter for SAP, but they also provide services to help map non-SAP sources to their data schema.

The Oco presentation included a transportation spend analysis demo that included information extracted from transactional sources and industry-specific benchmarking data from Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium. (View the press release on Supply Chain Intelligence: Next Generation of Benchmarking and Analytics is Powered by SaaS.) The prospective user was able to compare their performance against relevant benchmarks with the help of some really cool drill-down and discovery capabilities.

While I was impressed by both solutions, my initial reaction was to ask: How do you position these solutions to enterprises with top-tier ERP and supply chain suite solutions?

Many of these organizations already have a standard BI solution and tool set. If I am running BusinessObjects, Cognos or Hyperion, why would I be interested in Oco or Blue Sky? But then I remember the senior VP who has been waiting seven years for his dashboards.

I understand why an IT department using a full BI package may not be that adverse to an Oco-like solution. They may even jump at the opportunity to get logistics off their back.

It may take many person-months to develop similar content as Oco provides using their standard BI tools. Oco can do it in weeks within a SaaS framework.

The BI world is not one-dimensional. There is room for agile solutions that can bring immediate value to a targeted audience at an attractive price.

These solutions and traditional packages are not mutually exclusive. In many ways, these solutions complement full BI packages by offloading content and audiences that are better addressed by a specialty solution. Plus, they keep important audiences from waiting seven years for their dashboards.

So where are your dashboards?

-- Tom

Tags: supply chain intelligence, benchmarking, wms