Supply Chain Data Visibility is Only Half of the Challenge

How Good Is Your Business Radar?

Challenges and uncertainties facing value chains are only increasing in frequency. Upward trends in product/service complexity, lean optimization, outsourcing, and globalization have led to complex, dynamic networks which can be easily disrupted by change. Organizations must now perform consistently at elite levels across divisions and functions in order to meet growth objectives. Perhaps the single most important area of competency that has emerged over the past decade is competency in business intelligence: taking maximum advantage of all information available to a business to quickly perceive truths and make decisions with respect to strategy and execution. 

While technology solutions abound to help enterprise data management and analysis, 95% of all companies are still struggling with the challenge of data visibility and gaining the essential insights. What is now clear is that organizational capability to quickly recognize, interpret, and take appropriate action on business intelligence must share the central stage alongside data visibility technology initiatives. 

Information that is not shared, processed, and put into proper context is useless to a business. That’s where competency in creating a powerful dashboard plays a strong role. Having a single, powerful view of business performance, or ‘eyes of the business,’ is the result the hard work performed in strategy development, data management, scenario planning, and risk modeling combine in a single view of business perception on current and anticipated future performance. It can manifest itself within an ERP control tower, which is the preferred mode of operation, or even as a tablet-driven set of visual and color-coded metrics.   

This dashboard contains three distinct types of metrics designed to provide everything an enterprise needs to know to grow in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change: 

1.  Traditional top-line metrics, such as Revenue, EBIT, gross margin, etc.

2.  Intermediate metrics that specifically connect the value of enterprise activities and initiatives to the top-line. Each function, such as value chain in the case of this article, will own metrics in this space. These metrics are outcome-based metrics (versus output-based), which are specifically crafted to measure progress towards desirable end-points envisioned by the business strategy.

3.  Causal or diagnostic metrics to the intermediate metrics, which provide leading indicator insights to future changes and abnormal situations, as well as root-cause flags to assist the OPEX and Quality offices to execute their missions.  

Such a dashboard is depicted below. Each metric is refreshed on its own renewal cycle, whether it be quarterly, monthly, or even hourly. To perform its agile mission, the aim is to make the dashboard a real-time sensing mechanism. This is not possible when data systems don’t exist to support continual refreshing. Real-time sensing is the ultimate goal in this space, and the better an enterprise gets at this activity the more capable it will be in warding off disruptions.

To find out more click the link below:

https://www.octagonvaluechain.com/dashboard