Leveraging Supply Chain Analytics: Can Your Solution Keep Up with Data Growth?

Analytics has become a major buzzword on the web, where companies use it to assess site hits, visits, click-throughs, abandonment rates, and a number of other measures that help them increase visitor engagement and interaction. The same concept is being applied to the supply chain, where companies are breaking out of the traditional "knowing what happened in the past" mentality and using analytics to make fast decisions, improve customer service, and gain competitive advantages.

In his Supply Chain in 2013 blog post, Bob Eastman, a senior analyst in supply chain for Technology Evaluation Centers made several supply chain management (SCM) predictions. He acknowledged that analytics has taken on increasing importance in the supply chain space, and said "Companies are finding more ways, on both the demand and supply sides, to use analytics (and, increasingly, predictive analytics) to drive better internal efficiency as well as customized and enhanced customer response."

Credit the proliferation of both supply chain data and big data overall with driving the growing interest in supply chain analytics. Inundated with massive quantities of inventory, network, demand, capacity, and related data, those companies that effectively leverage analytics are the ones that are making better, faster, and more efficient decisions in real-time. 

Dynamics ERP products themselves are moving toward better built-in analytics, with efforts to call upon Microsoft technology to embed more reports into the user experience based on tools like SQL Server Reporting Services,  PowerPivot and Power View. In fact, the reporting experts in Dynamics ERP community has considered Excel-based reporting, including PowerPivot, for some time as a go-to analytics tool.

With the introduction of OData web services in Dynamics NAV 2013, PowerPivot is expected to ...