Your business needs
As a Supply Chain or Operations leader, you should be aware that there’s huge business value to be harvested from the data in your operational systems. If, despite your best efforts to extract meaningful insights from this data, you don’t seem to be getting them, the chances are you’re trapped in any or all of the following scenarios:
Data access
Your IT systems were probably designed well before the business value of data was acknowledged. Ownership of your data therefore rests with IT, so you are reliant on your IT department to extract it from the various silos it’s stored in. That’s a lengthy and costly exercise. And you may well have come up against objections on the grounds of security and data privacy.
Excel Hell
Your Business and financial analysts may well be locked in ‘Excel Hell’ trying to derive insights from the data they have been provided with. In addition to the fact that spreadsheets are incredibly susceptible to errors, with 9 out of 10 probably containing them, creating an approved management report typically takes around 89 hours and ties up 8 people in the process. To give one example of the detrimental impact, one company on Wall Street’s practice of copy-pasting data and linking Excel sheets led to a 6 billion dollar trading loss because of a cut-and-paste mistake by a data modeler.
Technology Focus
In an attempt to improve capabilities, you may have purchased data mining tools that promise great results. But your IT people’s lack of data analysis knowledge means they don’t know how to use these tools properly and no tangible difference is being realised.
If any of these situations apply to you, you’re settling for significantly lower quantity and quality data than you need to get the business results you want.
