Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain Management

When any firm wants to build and sell a product to other businesses, it buys raw materials and a variety of contracted services from other companies. The interrelationships with suppliers, customers, distributors, and other businesses that are needed to design, build, and sell a product make up the network of business entities, relationships, and processes that is called a supply chain. Business intelligence involves the integration of core information with meaningful business information to detect significant events and discover new business scenarios and predict business situations. It includes the ability to monitor business trends, to evolve and adapt quickly as situations change and to make intelligent business decisions on uncertain judgments and contradictory information. The paper tries to identify the role of business intelligence in supply chain management. The paper presents several examples of BI enabled Supply chain management.