The increasing globalization and digitalization have transformed conventional businesses into modern and efficient enterprises. The supply chain plays an important role in the success of a business because it directly influences an organization’s capability to improve profitability, and better control over expenses, workflows, and customer experience.
Given the soaring significance of the supply chain to businesses, many have upped their supply chain management initiatives. They’re ready to consider any prospects to make their workflow and processes faster, easier, and cheaper to make their supply chain efficient.
The supply chains have become quite complex with more international partners, massive information exchange, and the pressure of delivering goods as quickly as possible.
This is where supply chain analytics comes into the picture. It transforms massive data into captivating data visualization, reports, and digestible dashboards, that influence decision-making and deliver better outcomes.
The concept of Supply chain management has been in existence for quite a while, the conventional approach toward achieving supply chain analysis has progressed significantly, especially in recent times.
It is a process that performs quantitative methods on the data to improve the decision-making for the supply chain management functions for any enterprise.
Supply chain analytics tools fetch data from various applications and data sources linked with an industrial supply chain and then perform numerous analyses to produce intended information for decision-making.
Supply chain analytics can certainly enhance an enterprise’s capability to offer an optimistic and personalized consumer experience, which led to an increase in overall profitability.
Supply chain analytics plays a key role to uncover unprecedented opportunities for process and workflow enhancement. Here are how supply chain analytics functions for an organization:
Data is procured from both inside and outside of an organization. Supply chain analytics not only ensures data sources are defined correctly, but it also monitors numerous metrics to understand and evaluate an organization’s performance.
In this step, the supply chain analytics assesses the data and transforms it into meaningful insight. It fetches data from multiple sources and builds an effective data-based strategy to enhance overall performance.
Supply chain analytics develops a distinctive and customized data structure to meet the unique requirements of your supply chain management needs. It also conducts real-time analytics to confirm a rapid response to possible changes. It also offers accurate forecasts that ultimately lead to overall growth.
Supply chain analytics enables organizations in understanding the problems and their underlying root causes. It evaluates various functions such as product inventory, product quality, suppliers, etc to ensure seamless improvement across the board.
Data-driven decision-making led to an overall cultural improvement for any organization at all levels. A thorough knowledge of the functioning of supply chain analysis and end-to-end access to the data empowers the employees to improve their operational decisions and better efficiency.
There are several types of supply chain analytics, including:
It looks into the historical data and looks for patterns to understand the flow of data in the past. This data could be fetched from both the external systems and the internal supply chain solution that provide visibility across distributors, suppliers, customers, and sales channels.
This analytics enables seamless comparison of similar data from different timeframes to determine patterns and hypothesize potential factors behind the changes.
A business can evaluate a descriptive analytics dashboard to check its delivery patterns and find that most of its distributors are running late.
This problem is then further investigated, and an underlying root cause could be found. Businesses can take corrective action to improve the delivery to make their customer’s experience better.
This analytics enables a business to predict future scenarios that may impact its overall performance, supply chain disruptions, and customer experience. It follows a proactive approach and enables business leaders to take corrective action beforehand.
They can develop a strategy to counter a spike or fall in customer demands or supply chain disruption.
A manufacturer can review the economic projections and understand the potential outcomes proactively. Suppose there is a possibility of a fall in sales by 5-10% in the next quarter, then a business can reduce production, order smaller quantities of raw material, or may ask part-time or contractual workers to work fewer hours for the time being.
It combines the outcomes of both descriptive and predictive analytics to recommend what potential actions a business must take to achieve its intended objectives. It enables businesses to evaluate the data of their stakeholders to tackle supply chain-specific problems and avert major business disruptions in the future.
Since these analytics is more complex, it needs a more robust software solution that can seamlessly process the data and offer more valuable insights for decision-makers.
Prescriptive analytics may raise an alarm that one of its key suppliers in South Asia may stall its business within a couple of months. It may offer insights into late orders, reduced supplying capacity, and declining political or economic conditions in that region, which may impact the supply chain operations.
In response, the business owners can set up a meeting with the supplier, understand its concern, take corrective action, or may replace it before it’s too late.
it tries to replicate human behavior and thinking to address complex queries and scenarios of a business. These analytics can understand the context of a situation while interpreting results and recommending corrective actions. To achieve this, Cognitive analytics uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, which makes it knowledgeable and smarter over time.
This also allows employees to pull complex reports and analyze them without the assistance of the data science team. With an AI-enabled solution, a business can automate various functions such as demand, planning, and expense monitoring.
The software can analyze both internal and external data and offer highly accurate and precise recommendations to meet dynamic customer demands.
Supply chain analytics can offer the following benefits to any organization:
Supply chain analytics discovers the underlying root cause for incorrect estimates, slow stocks, and supply chain disruptions accurately. It allows a business to boost its sales in no time with accurate forecasts to meet dynamic customer demands.
Supply chain analytics changes the raw ERP system data into structured operational metrics, which offers better insights and understanding to the decision makers. This assists them to discover process loopholes and take corrective actions to mitigate potential supply chain crises.
Supply chain analytics enables an enterprise to build and implement an advanced supply chain strategy, which mitigates inaccurate measurements to enhance the overall performance of supply chain management.
Allocating adequate resources at the right time can improve supply chain workflows and accelerate the speed of operations. Supply chain analytics decreases the burden of conventional workflow and substitutes it with suitable solutions to avail better performance and customer service.
Read more: The Benefits of Power BI for Revolutionizing Industries
Here are some must-have features for efficient supply chain analytics software.
It must have features that allow seamless access to the structured data from the IoT (Internet of Things) and unstructured data from social media, along with the conventional datasets available via B2B integration tools and ERP.
The software must offer collaborative capabilities. It will enhance the collaboration with suppliers and other stakeholders, which allows the users to use cloud-based commerce networks to ensure multi-enterprise engagement and collaboration with ease.
The supply chain analytics solution must be aware of the cyber threats and remediation methods. It must adequately harden itself from various cyber hacks and intrusions, which must be an enterprise-wide concern.
Your sully chain analytics must be self-learning and automated in nature. As the AI platform has become a must-have trait for supply chain analytics, as it helps them in organizing, managing, and oversee actions and decisions across the chain.
The analytics capabilities of your solution must be flexible enough to be scaled with data in real-time. It should offer deep Insights rapidly and comprehensively while ensuring almost negligible latency in the modern supply chain.
A supply chain analytics system is integrated with the following sub-systems:
It handles spending tracking and analysis, spending forecasting, purchasing trends analysis, and many more functions.
It is used for managing data-driven inventory distribution between numerous storage locations, lead times prediction, inventory demand planning, and more.
this is used for supplier performance tracking and analysis. It also takes care of bid analysis, supplier risk analysis, AI-aided recommendations, and payment terms analysis on purchase orders to supplier assignment.
It manages the freight spend analysis, transportation costs analysis, route schedules planning, shipping method analysis, and carrier analysis.
it primarily focussed on order processing, order execution analysis, delayed order analysis, returned order analysis, etc.
It is used for end-to-end customer demand planning and forecasting. It let the professionals interact with the customers using in-depth data analysis to examine vast amounts of information.
It enables an organization to identify and disrupt the supply chain and analyze procurement, transportation, and storage. It also allows an organization to build strategies for decreasing supply chain costs at all levels of enterprise planning.
We frequently use the below tools to develop supply chain analytics projects for our clients:
Microsoft Power BI – It is among the most popular self-service supply chain intelligence solution. It facilitates the incorporation of supply chain data across the organization with over a hundred native data source connectors. Microsoft Power BI enables non-technical users in developing tailored reports and dashboards with ease.
Pricing
Azure Synapse Analytics – This tool is used for saving supply chain big data and performing complicated analytical querying. It also allows seamless data integration of supply chain data from numerous data sources across an organization, which allows various departments to carry out analytical querying in no time.
Pricing
An efficient supply chain analytics solution must have some vital traits, which allow a business to use them to improve its overall productivity.
An efficient supply chain analytics solution needs to have open lines of communication and common objectives agreed upon and established between all supply chain functions. A common vision will make the system well-organized and ensure seamless information exchange among all entities.
The solution must be agile enough to work with different functions and meet your business needs on short-term notice, markedly while working with commodities. It enables the decision-makers in gaining collaborative responses quickly when any problem arises.
An efficient supply chain analytics software could deliver brilliant outcomes if all stakeholders meet certain deadlines. Any sort of delay by any function can cause a delay in the rest of the supply chain workflows, which may lead to time, money, trust, and even reputation loss.
Emerging technology can certainly influence the supply chain management process and decision-making. To ensure superiority and remain competitive, organizations must select supply chain analytics solution, which incorporates modern technologies and innovation to transform the traditional supply chain processes.
The significance of sustainability in different functions of a supply chain is vital when evaluating the impact it may cause on the environment.
There are many concerns about the procurement of raw materials, environment friendliness of business, transportation strategy, and even CO2 emissions. The supply chain analytics software must consider all these factors while devising the long-term strategy.
It is much more than the traceability of services and products as they move along the supply chain. The solution must offer a high level of transparency and ensure a seamless flow of information through manufacturing, purchasing, sales, and distribution functions.
An organization must imbibe policies and procedures in its supply chain analytics solution, which can offer a higher level of performance and a greater degree of visibility to its clients.
Read more: Retail Analytics Solution Development – Comprehensive Guide
The cost to implement a supply chain analytics project consists of the BI development of a data warehouse, self-service reports and dashboards, and OLAP cubes. Here is a common cost breakup for your supply chain analytics:
$40,000 – $100,000* – for organizations with 200 – 500 employees.
$120,000 – $200,000* – for organizations with 500 – 1,000 employees.
$250,000 – $400,000* – for organizations with 1,000+ employees.
The cost of implementing the supply chain analytics depends on various factors, such as:
Supply chain analytics showcase the ability to make data-driven decisions, based on trusted and relevant data, which often utilize visualization in the form of charts, graphs, and several other means.
However, you must need a trusted partner, who can design a suitable solution, which can enable you to avail all the benefits of supply chain analytics.
And this is where Arka Softwares comes into the picture. With more than a decade long experience in data analytics and supply chain management.
We can assist organizations to develop, implement and optimize supply chain analytics solutions, which can help them consolidate their data under one roof, manage supply chain operations, and support the supply chain decision-making at a granular level.
Our experts can help you manage your existing supply chain infrastructure, and work on solution ideation, design, and implementation planning services. While also ensuring your cost estimation and time budget estimates are handled efficiently.
Supply Chain Management has the following primary components:
● Plan
● Source
● Make
● Delivery
● Return
An enterprise can use supply chain analytics to predict future demands and make better-informed decisions. It enables enterprises to decide what products can be reduced when they become less profitable. It also allows enterprises to understand customer needs and improve the supply based on their order history.
We can use the following five key metrics to track and improve your supply chain operation:
● Fill Rate
● Inventory Turnover
● Perfect Order Index
● Cash-to-Cash Time
● Supply Chain cycle time
Supply chain analytics offers a plethora of benefits to an organization, which enables it to transform its supply chain operation. If used effectively, it enables organizations to convert their data into actionable reports, visualizations and dashboards to attain better outcomes via better decision-making in their supply chain operations.
Supply Chain Analysis considers raw material costs, production costs, labor wages, technology, etc. It helps companies and manufacturers to understand the influence of these constraints on supply and demand.
Jeeto11
The app quickly earned over 1,000 downloads within two months of launch, and users have responded positively. ARKA Softwares boasted experienced resources who were happy to share their knowledge with the internal team.
Archithrones
While the development is ongoing, the client is pleased with the work thus far, which has met expectations. ARKA Softwares puts the needs of the client first, remaining open to feedback on their work. Their team is adaptable, responsive, and hard-working.
Service Provider
I started my project with Arka Softwares because it is a reputed company. And when I started working with them for my project, I found out that they have everything essential for my work. The app is still under development and but quite confident and it will turn out to be the best.
