Supply Chain Intelligence

This chapter provides on overall picture of business intelligence (BI) and supply chain analytics (SCA) as a means to support supply chain management (SCM) and decision-making. Based on the literature review, we clarify the needs of BI and performance measurement in the SCM sphere, and discuss its potential to enhance decision-making in strategic, tactical and operational levels. We also make a closer look in to SCA in different areas and functions of SCM. Our findings indicate that the main challenge for harnessing the full potential of SCA is the lack of holistic and integrated BI approaches that originates from the fact that each functional area is using its own IT applications without necessary integration in to the company’s overall BI system. Following this examination, we construct a holistic framework that illustrates how an integrated, managerially planned BI system can be developed. Finally, we discuss the main competency requirements, as well as the challenges still prohibiting the great majority of firms from building smart and comprehensive BI systems for SCM.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Global Markets and Time-Based Competition

Time becomes the benchmark that defines a company’s strategic behaviour, extensively revamping the entire company by reinterpreting the time dimension in a different, extremely dynamic context. Marketing activities always presuppose time-based competition. From a marketing perspective, oriented to analysis of the competition, time-based competition can be defined as a strategy based on immediate response to the customer’s needs. In the competitive conditions of over-supply, the time dimension, as it is indicated by time-based competition, is of great significance for the measurements and characteristics of performance measurement systems