Integration Is the Key

In an intelligent enterprise exceptions and the chaos of rush orders are accepted as the norm. Success lies in the close integration of business intelligence with the organization and the warehouse management system. Inputs are provided based on what actually passes through checkpoints along the supply chain. The warehouse management system, for example, is fed the information that Store 144 will run out of certain SKUs far more quickly than usual; also, the system knows a truck is on its way to the warehouse with the inventory required by the store. In Intelligent Enterprise, BI would have forecast the demand, and based on predefined business rules, would recognize the truck as having critical inventory for Store 144. A work order produced from the BI system would then put this truck at the top of the list of trucks waiting to be processed and mark the truck's goods as urgent. The shift manager would schedule the truck to be processed ahead of the 15 to 20 vehicles waiting to be processed, thus creating a small delay that saves hours on this critical delivery and maintains the best balance of exception and profit.

A BI-integrated warehouse management system would produce a work order for the dock worker that indicates the pallets containing the inventory for Store 144 as urgent and would instruct the dock worker to put the pallets in a cross-dock instead of in stock. This series of processes would then cause the critical inventory to be delivered to Store 144 within hours instead of days. And this will happen every single time, as opposed to only when a supervisor gets involved in manual handling of an extremely urgent shipment.

In an Intelligent Enterprise highly disruptive processes that were manually expedited on occasion are now executed every time without disruption to the system. All of this happens without the manager or line worker receiving any special training on report interpretation or decision-making.

Similarly, system processes will be fully integrated with the BI systems, designed now to follow dynamic, rather than static, rules. To understand this better, consider the work of the dock worker in the previous illustration. With the warehouse system fully integrated with BI, the scan gun the dock worker uses is programmed to enact special handling of a pallet being off-loaded from the truck. As soon as the dock worker scans a pallet that is meant to be expedited, the BI business rule will cause an audible beep and a message to flash on his scanner, indicating the pallet has to be sent to the cross-dock area. As soon as the scanner in the cross-dock scans these pallets, the warehouse management system realizes the shipment items are complete, and the next truck out can be loaded with the inventory for Store 144 and expedite the process of delivery.