Business Intelligence Systems:A Necessity for Agile Supply Chains

Enterprises today have to be more responsive and agile to customer needs. In addition to being able to deliver in shorter lead times, they also need to manage much wider assortment of products. Thus the challenge for the enterprise is threefold - increased number of SKU's (Stock Keeping Units); reduced lead times and flexibility to accommodate last minute order amendments. In such a scenario, the entire value system has to be seamlessly integrated with every upstream and downstream channel partner sharing business intelligence for an integrated decision making process, thereby establishing a globally optimized system. Business intelligence (BI) overarches the decision support systems and processes for effective decision making while building agile supply chains. This paper bridges the gap in extant literature on the importance of BI in building agile and responsive supply chains through best practices and case examples of global and Indian firms. The paper enumerates the guiding principles of an agile supply chain and the critical success factors to establish such a system. The paper also analyzes the factors that are essential for firms to adopt technology which is a key enabler in the entire process.