The Problem With Tradition

Within the Intelligent Enterprise framework, a company can quickly see past the traditional bias of BI solutions as obscure analysis requiring a decision-maker for execution. In the traditional view of BI, managers are burdened by a deluge of reports created for their perusal. The line workers and system processes (programs running on a company's computers) are outside the influence of the BI solutions, as line workers are supposed to follow instructions, and the system processes follow the rules that have been programmed into them. Through Intelligent Enterprise, business intelligence platforms are considered as much a part of the business intelligence solutions as operating systems and databases.

Within the perspective of the Intelligent Enterprise framework, the first main difference is that BI solutions penetrate into the line worker and systems level within the enterprise. For example, we have a line worker at a raw goods warehouse. Trucks are queued, and they off-load at the dock on the first-come, first-served basis. In this scenario occasionally a shipment is extremely urgent, and a manager or shift supervisor manually intervenes to expedite a truck. This expediting requires precise coordination and simultaneously disrupts an entire chain of processes.

Now magnify the situation. From one warehouse we now have 10: A major manufacturer of toys maintains five raw materials factories, two sourcing plants overseas, three distribution centers nationwide, and cross-docker/consolidator issues at the borders. An unexpected rush order comes through for Wal-Mart, and because of the size of the order and a desire to maintain good customer relations, the item is pushed through the supply chain. How many orders of this sort can go through the system before efficiency begins to break down? Will half a dozen orders for different retail chains provide enough of a margin to offset the lost orders that arrived late due to push-backs in the chain? In today's real supply chain environments, managers and line workers are rendered vastly less effective in the face of increasing order complexity, and corporate profits plummet.