Using Business Intelligence and Analytics to Combat Supply Chain Disruptions

Over the past couple of years, the world has witnessed events that have disrupted several supply chains across the globe. The pandemic and current geopolitical turbulence have dealt a heavy blow to the global economy. While these are major events that have a global impact, most supply chain disruptions often stem from seemingly innocuous causes. Anticipating and navigating disruptions is essential to the success of every business. Enhancing predictive capabilities is a must for creating or maintaining a strong supply chain; it can give business owners the required time to create a strategy that can help them sail through unfavorable situations. Broadly, there are 3 major components to mitigating supply chain disruption: visibility, agility, and resilience. Visibility across your supply chain can help you anticipate potential future disruptions as well as equip you with the data to build an effective response to such disruptions. Agility is the ability to gauge and act quickly against disruptions to minimize the overall impact. Resilience is the ability to resist, absorb, and recover from disruptions. The most efficient tools to preempt and stay afloat during a disruption are Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI & A).

What is BI&A?

Business Intelligence (BI) deals with 'what' happened in the past and 'how' it happened. It allows us to identify trends and patterns. Analytics (A) deals with the 'why' of what happened in the past. It allows us to identify reasons and use the findings to make predictions of what might happen in the future. Effectively, BI & A solutions collect, analyze, and drive insights from data to help you know your business better and make timely, informed decisions based on gathered predictions. [Box: “BI is needed to run the business, while business analytics are needed to change the business.” – Pat Roche, VP-Engineering, Magnitude Software] A quality BI & A solution uses advanced technologies such as AI with machine learning to compile complex data across the supply chain, extract insights from your company’s raw data, and finally analyze as well as present this data in the form of dashboards and reports to help stakeholders comprehend complex information easily.

Additional Read: How Business Intelligence and Analytics Help You Gain Competitive Advantage

How BI & A help

Implementing a high-quality BI & A solution can create immense value for any business. BI & A helps improve the visibility, agility, and resilience of a supply chain, the three key components to mitigating supply chain disruption defined earlier in the blog. The predictive capabilities that analytics bring allow business leaders to spot disruptions afar, thereby allowing them to devise a strategy to either go around it or navigate it with minimal risk and cost impacts. Business Intelligence allows us to know what has affected a supply chain to weaken or fail in the past, so company owners can use that information and work on the weak links to make their supply chain more robust. Strengthening the supply chain makes it more resilient, so even if there is a disruption, the impact is much less, and it is significantly easier to withstand its impact. BI & A allows leadership teams to understand their supply chains in much greater detail. Leveraging BI & A enables leadership teams to evaluate and identify their areas of strength and weakness. The improved visibility that BI & A brings empowers business owners to clearly identify roadblocks and problem areas in real-time, so they can quickly make prompt and informed decisions to keep the supply chain running smoothly at all times.

Business intelligence and analytics are powerful tools that can not only help you avoid and/or navigate disruptions but also unlock the true potential of your organization to give you a significant competitive edge. Supply Chain Control Tower is a high-quality solution by BCI with a comprehensive set of features and benefits, Business Intelligence and Analytics being an integral part of it. BCI's Supply Chain Control Tower is a customizable console that captures, stores, and manages data while also displaying key analytics and events from the entire supply chain in real time.

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