Marc Wouters

2019

Despite being a well investigated technology for many years, literature dealing with practical experiences and implications of BI developments in the area of supply chain management is extremely rare. We decided to conduct an exploratory case study on this topic to shed a light upon supply chain intelligence in a practical context. In the frame of this case study, we focused on the area of inventory management as we developed a BI application whose main feature should be to predict inventory levels based on structured inventory and planning data. The experiences we have made with the conceptualization, implementation and actual use of this development are discussed and put into the light of the existing literature. This paper discusses the benefits of BI for inventory management and inventory reporting, the role of data quality and common challenges that are experienced during the implementation of BI. Our findings suggest that BI comes with features that be beneficial for the area of inventory management, if adopted properly. Our observations indicate that one crucial cornerstone of BI success lays in the provision and management of sufficient data quality. We also identified several organizational and technical challenges that we were actually experienced during the conceptualization and implementation process of supply chain intelligence. Our findings should motivate further research on the practical implications of BI implementation and use on large data volumes in the supply chain area.