Supplier Data Management

When it comes to effectively managing business commerce, locating the best suppliers and negotiating the best agreements are a good start. But it’s only the beginning. To be successful, companies must constantly discover, assess, and on board new trading partners, ensure that their information is accurate and up-to-date, and continuously measure and improve upon performance. Yet many buyers and suppliers struggle to do this.

According to AMR Research, managing supplier information manually is a costly drain on business—in some cases more than $1,000 per supplier on an annual basis. But it doesn’t have to be. When information—enabled by technology—becomes visible across the organization, costs per supplier quickly fall to below $150. (Notes: AMR Research, Inc. was an independent research and industry analysis firm founded by Tony Friscia in 2006 and sold to Gartner Research for $64 million in 2009. AMR was the leading firm in its sector focused on global supply chain best practices and all supporting technologies. Its services continue to be offered by Gartner).

Yet achieving complete visibility on supplier information isn’t easy and there are a number of challenges that make it difficult:

·        Inaccurate and fragmented information spread across multiple, disconnected systems

·         Incorrect, incomplete, and out-of-date supplier records

·        Lack of visibility into supplier performance, risk exposures (financial, brand, reputation, disruption) and financial metrics

·        Inconsistent or non-existent processes to on board new suppliers and measure performance

·        Large numbers of suppliers, making supplier segmentation and prioritization efforts cumbersome and, as a result, limited

UMW Toyota would like to implement a comprehensive business intelligence initiative to provide insights to their decision support managers and knowledge workers on their supplier analysis using business intelligence dashboards with analytical capabilities.

The main objectives of the Business Development by third party provider:

·       Design and development of a central data store (Data mart) - source data mainly from Excel or comma separated value (CSV) files

·       Source of information will be primarily form Vendor list, PO list, Contract list and Maintenance list

·        Automatically generate dynamic reports for different level of views such as

·        Corporate Management level

·        Divisional level (Operations)

·       Provide necessary training to ensure administrative users and end users are fully aware of the system functionality

·        Provide helpdesk support (Remote and onsite support)

The following image indicates an overview of the BI architecture in the proposed UMW Toyota BI development initiative.

Image: Enterprise Content Management framework

The central data store is required for reliable, consolidated, unique and integrated reporting and analysis of its data, at different levels of the organization. This data will be used by business intelligence module for reporting, analysing and data presentation purpose.

The following are the phases of the data warehousing process.

·        Data Warehouse Planning is very important to the success of the UMW’s project. The Planning phase determines what the data warehouse will do and how it will need to function when implementation is complete.

·        Data Warehouse Design and Implementation includes the components for realizing the value of the data warehouse in the decision support process.

·        Data Warehouse Usage, Support, and Enhancement phase provides for use and maintenance of the data warehouse environment.

Following are some sample screens (showcase of sample analytics) that provides insights into how the proposed solution helps UMW Toyota in achieving the Dashboard and Analytics Initiatives.

The above screen provides insights into Supplier Profile Analysis

 

 

The above screen provides insights into Supplier registration spread and their activities

The above screen provides insights into product analysis supplied to UMW Toyota by the suppliers

 

 

The above screen provides insights into buyers and Transactions of products by UMW Toyota

The KPI Reporting and intelligence Dashboards or Business intelligence (BI) module provide the decision support managers and the management of the UMW Toyota Motor Sdn Bhd with capabilities of:

·         Data analysis

·         Situation awareness

·         Risk management and

·         Decision Making process

To summarize, the business intelligence analytics will allow management and end users to generate user-defined reports and perform ad-hoc analysis, slice-and-dice and drill-down of information to analyse their business information and performance.