It is a fact, as we are approaching the end of another year of international turbulence, businesses around the world are trying to find ways to increase their supply chain resilience to multi-country disruptions. A strong supply chain strategy seems the only way to avoid roadblocks and prevent slowdowns.
In the era of digital transformation, historical and real-time data can shield businesses against global trade turmoil. BI (Business Intelligence) and supply chain analytics help organizations make informed decisions about their logistics and transportation processes and contribute to developing self-stabilizing supply chains, adaptable to external challenges and vital transformations.
The use of a BI platform can be critical when it comes to controlling an ever- broadening ecosystem and stabilizing more quickly to external shocks. An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or MRP (Materials Requirement Planning) system, for instance, can remove data silos between different business functions, while an analytics tool can consolidate dispersed data to uncover meaningful insights that will lead to more accurate decision-making. Power BI helps users align the processes to suit the market trends and get measurable KPIs.
What Business Intelligence platforms / Power BI offer?
All in one Desktop
A Power BI Desktop connects with various data sources (Google Analytics or QuickBooks or cloud databases like those in Azure) and loads data on a local computer, generating reports and creating visualizations.
Real-time data
Power BI follows the process of collecting, transforming, enhancing, and loading different data from various sources of the organization, applies the appropriate data models according to the granularity and the aggregation level dictated by the business’ needs and makes it available to be displayed on a single dashboard, thus making it easier for the user to have access to more useful and complete information. Data may be refreshed automatically, depending on data frequency requirements, so that the user can have 24/7 real-time information and up-to-date reports.
Unified data visualization
Power BI visualizes data from different data sources and platforms, even when those platforms provide different formats of data (e.g. CSV files, or Excel workbooks, XML files, data exports or JSON files). This helps different business functions within the supply chain to combine and associate data from various sources, and share information in a unified way, making it easier for the users to interact with their data.
Custom visualizations and reports
Usually, it is the business needs that provide the requirements for the metrics and the KPIs that will be meaningful for the management and evaluation of their operations, and they may differ according to each business function.
A warehouse KPI dashboard, for instance, could be analytical, operational, strategic, or tactical. Reports also differ depending on whether a user wants to measure inbound productivity, tracking outbound performance, or to measure put away efficiency. Power BI, through its flexible data modeling mechanism and the advanced visualization tools and features, allows users to customize their dashboards to meet their individual business requirements.
Actionable insights
From monitoring the competition and the market’s trends to estimating the lead time of deliveries or benchmarking the performance of a warehouse, Power BI gives all the information one needs to plan. By means of Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), users can analyze, compare, and forecast costs, revenues, product demand and other information that contributes to accurate decision-making.
Following KPIs
Power BI enables users to track KPIs especially in organizations that want to trail supply chain across multiple, dispersed vendors or partners that use different data sources, platforms, or ecosystems.
The use of analytics in supply chain management
Order Processing
Monitoring sales or orders can offer principal information for evaluating major KPIs. Power BI, through up-to-date information and flexible data modeling mechanisms helps businesses manage the entire workflow, targeting logistics costs and savings opportunities. Focusing on the business size and region, ensures the efficiency of order processing, such as picking inventory, order placement, sorting, packing, and shipping.
Production planning
Planning is the most important function in supply chain management as it helps balance supply and demand, so that sales revenue opportunities are fully exploited in a timely manner and at the lowest possible cost.
Power BI modifies data from various sources to help businesses make informed decisions about their production planning strategy. It helps analyze net production plan and compare with derived output to understand production fill rate%. Observe the impact on availability, effective capacity & overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Create & compare different scenarios after changing stores inventory & sequence time to get the closest available conversion rate of raw material to finished goods.
Warehouse Management
Whether it is raw materials or finished goods, managing the inventory plays a key role in safeguarding the goods which are to be distributed to the customers. An effective warehouse management system audits and tracks the materials and goods, offering important data for store settings and specific requirements like docking facilities, cold storage, etc.
Power BI uses warehouse management and other transactional data to offer important inbound, outbound and inventory metrics. It provides an overall view of warehouse performance and a breakdown per vendors, product groups, products, and warehouses.
Inventory Management
Effective inventory management determines and analyzes if there is too much or too little stock in the warehouse, making it easier to maintain sufficient level inventories or determine restocking time.
Power BI tracking inventory databases offer all the information needed for optimizing the inventory, ensuring the goods safekeeping, and determining production to meet each customer’s demands. Inbound and outbound historical and real-time data, offer insights that help organizations take on-time decisions, respond quicker to disruptive changes, and set realistic future goals.
Demand Forecasting
In logistics inventory forecasting is an effective way to predict the requirement for products or goods to fulfill orders in the shortest time span but, at the same time, avoid overloading losses.
Power BI offers actionable insights on established and new market trends. It helps organizations to avoid bottlenecks, delays, and errors. By using advanced forecasting models, businesses can adopt a quick response strategy that will help them cover customer demands, without losses, even under uncontrollable conditions.
Transportation
Transporting goods throughout a company’s supply chain requires automated routing and route optimization to save time and money. Today, due to external disruptions, transferring goods from one point to another seems more challenging than ever.
Power BI, through its flexible data modeling mechanism, helps businesses predict, prevent, detect, and respond to possible threats and vulnerabilities of the transportation chain. It classifies transportation cost into various categories, predicts fixed and variable expenses, optimizes the size of the consignments, identifies process optimization opportunities, gives an advanced analysis of transportation costs, performs what-if analysis, creates, and compares multiple scenarios based on various simulations on the transportation costs and, at the end of the day, mitigates the transportation risk.
Packaging
The right packaging for the right kind of products ensures that they are transferred in large volumes from point A to point B without damage, deterioration, and tampering. The necessary measures should be taken to avoid regulatory issues and make transportation cost-effective, reducing the amount of food loss and waste.
In terms of packaging, Power BI combines historical and real-time data to connect the amount and the kind of products to the amount and the material of packaging needed, all in one dashboard.
Power BI also helps businesses adopt different innovative strategies based on specific conditions suitable for the local, regional, and global background, considering energy and infrastructure limitations and targeted food loss in developing countries and food waste in developed countries.
Fleet Management
Tracking and monitoring commercial vehicles help businesses manage costs and improve the maintenance of fleets to ensure the safety of the drivers. Real-time visibility adds to operational efficiency and secures compliance within the supply chain.
Power BI helps to effectively manage fleets and improve vehicle performance and utilization. Advanced analytics offer real-time information on vehicle tracking, reporting on fuel consumption, monitoring of driver behavior and management of vehicle maintenance. It also helps organizations make informed decisions on route detour and traffic flow management in case of external disruptions.
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