Aberdeen Examines BI in the Supply Chain

Business intelligence has to do with brains, but what about the bucks? If you ask supply chain executives about the value that business intelligence brings, it’s clear the two can’t be separated. But business value is not necessarily concordant with big software investments. And companies with an IBM i platform running their critical supply chain applications have the same issues related to organizational and process management, along with technology management, as any other organization.

What’s hoped for in a business intelligence solution and what’s getting accomplished often isn’t within shouting distance of one another. And that’s why analyst firms such as the Aberdeen Group do research that shows the two extremes and everything in between.

According to an Aberdeen Group research survey that was conducted in March and April, only 33 percent of the companies surveyed had a supply chain business intelligence initiative in place for two or more years. When looking at only small and mid-size companies, that figure drops to 20 percent. It’s the enterprises with revenue in excess of $1 billion–where 50 percent have a BI initiative–that inflate the implementation figure.

As Bill Langston, marketing director at New Generation Software noted to me, “It’s significant that Aberdeen points out that companies with revenue of more than $1 billion are far more likely than small to mid-size companies to have a business intelligence program. I think that’s fairly accurate and relevant to IBM i customers since the vast majority of them are in that under $1 billion category. IBM i IT professionals who invest the time to understand how the business applications they maintain on IBM i and the business users BI needs have a great opportunity to provide value to their employers.”

New Generation Software is in the IBM i business intelligence market with a product that spans ad hoc query; production, and Web reporting; online analytical processing; business performance dashboards; summary-to-detail drill down; native access to DB2 on i; and remote access to Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and other data sources.

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