Commentary: BI tools for monitoring or decision-making?

Every software provider has reporting capabilities for its users, but the trick for supply chain practitioners is determining whether business intelligence output is useful for monitoring or to impact operations.    Business intelligence (BI) tools are all the rage these days because they are designed to help users make better sense of all the data generated and collected by modern enterprise systems.
   But there’s a crucial application aspect of BI tools, also known as reporting tools, to understand: are they being used for monitoring or to assist with decision-making, or both?
   BI tools allow a company to parse through its data to find the bits most important to its operations. Maybe that means figuring out which carrier is letting it down (or conversely, for a carrier to see if a shipper is unprofitable for it to serve). Maybe it just means going through visibility data to determine whether a perceived chokepoint is actually a problem.
   But users of BI tools should determine, prior to using the tool, how they want to use the output. A monthly report on freight spending by lane and carrier is useful in terms of monitoring a company’s network after the fact. But that report could also feed into procurement decision-making the next time a shipper bids out its business to carriers.
   More real-time BI outputs might let a company monitor in-transit inventory on a vessel, for instance, but also allow it decide on a diversion if there is a known problem at the destination port.
   I often hear about this two-pronged approach to BI when it comes to mobile versions of supply chain management systems. Someone at the VP level may only need a high-level dashboard on his or her phone that gives a picture of total supply chain health, while someone closer to operations might need a BI tool that takes data filtering and allows them to act on it.
   That bifurcation probably extends to a desktop version of a supply chain management system too. The higher on the food chain a person is, the less likely he or she is going to need a tool that helps make decisions on a granular level. That person will want assistance with decisions on a macro level.
   The point here is that BI tools are as useful as the preparatory work that goes into them. Reporting gives a company insight into its operational health, but if the usefulness stops there, it’s essentially a monitoring tool, like someone taking their blood pressure once a week to make sure it’s not dangerously high.
   BI tools should be geared toward decision-making though. If you’re taking your blood pressure once a week, wouldn’t it be cool to know why it was a little higher one week to see if it’s the first manifestation of a bigger problem, or a one-time blip?
   There’s latent potential in almost every tech tool these days, so don’t leave this capability on the table. If you’re working with a 3PL, are using supply chain software, or even leaning on your internal IT department, chances are good you have some sort of BI or reporting tool at your disposal.
   Aim to maximize the use of those tools so that they influence your behavior across a range of transportation and logistics activities. If you don’t know how to do that, ask the provider of the tool to help.