What are the general trends in the business intelligence area?
Initially, people looked at data warehousing and business intelligence in terms of how they could improve sales using customer-related data. Now, companies are realizing they need to extend their analytical applications to encompass their supply chains as well. An enterprise-wide view takes into account not just customer related activities, but also your partners, your suppliers, possibly some of their customers, and your manufacturing operations. It is a lot bigger picture to deal with. Companies are finding that by looking at production data, they can not only reduce their inventory across the supply chain, but also manage their partners; we’re starting to hear the term “partner relationship management.” A typical application of partner relationship management is using analytics to identify your top-performing suppliers and measure their performance over time. Based on those measurements, you can come up with a series of metrics and negotiate performance-based agreements. On the fron
