Analytics for Supply Chain and Operations

Background
In the last few years, there has been increased interest in using analytics in many areas of business. Part of the interest is driven by increased availability of data from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as well as “big data” from sources such as social media or in the supply chain context from sensors and RFID tags.

There are also more advanced technological capabilities to use analytics packages running on hardware that has larger memory and processing capacity or on the “cloud.”

Analytics have always played an important role in supply chain and operations in the form of demand forecasting and planning, transportation routing, inventory optimization and network design.

Analytics are also widely applied in related areas such as manufacturing, procurement and pricing. More recently analytics have been applied to supply chain segmentation, risk management, complexity reduction and manufacturing flexibility.

Many companies struggle with where to start investing resources in analytics. They may also be concerned with the possible disconnect between the business requirements and the
analytics process. They would also prefer to have this capability in house so as to be able to continuously support operations with analytics.

OPS Rules has developed expertise that enables this process through its analyze/innovate/transform approach to Supply Chain and Operations Analytics.