Over on Supply Chain Management Review, an article by two Wipro consultants suggests that business intelligence (BI) software, such as the kind acquired by SAP and Oracle in recent years, is key to building supply chain visibility. The two argue that “BI capability allows monitoring of supply chain performance and helps in capturing new insights into all aspects of the businesses, fostering innovation.” Moreover, “BI allows driving performance improvement in individual functions, business processes that span across multiple functions and in the extended supply chain through collaboration with customers, vendors and other trading partners delivering significant benefits in terms of cost reduction, customer service improvements and lower inventory levels.” While this is a great vision, perhaps it’s better for those in the implementation and advisory ecosystem than for the actual customer that’s got to pay to make it all work.
There are a few reasons why the nirvana of BI supplier and supply chain visibility is most certainly a noble objective, but one that is unlikely to ever fully take hold outside of a few very expensive, highly customized implementations…
