Using Power BI for Supply Chain Management

A supply chain is the complete system starting from procurement or sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing of the final product or service and delivering it to the end-user or customer. Supply chain management manages the flow of goods or raw materials or services and includes all processes that are involved in the transformation of raw materials into final products. 

Today in the era of digitization, the use of business intelligence and analytics has become an important part of supply chain management. Supply chain analytics analyzes individual elements of the supply chain like procurement, inventory, warehouse, order management, shipping, and deliveries. Analysis of each element helps ensure that each part of the supply chain, like procurement, inventory, warehousing, order management, shipping and delivery, works as needed in cohesion with each other.

Benefits of Power BI for supply chain management 

Power BI or Microsoft Power BI refers to a collection of software services, apps & connectors that work in sync to convert data from different sources into consistent, organized, visually immersive and interactive insights enabling businesses to make informed decisions. It offers interactive business intelligence capabilities offering intuitive visualization capabilities for creating dashboards and smart reports. It has built-in AI capabilities and pre-built data connectors and offers easy integration into other Microsoft resources like MS Azure, Microsoft 365 & provides end-to-end encryption and real-time monitoring. 

Power BI offers a versatile solution to visualize supply chain operations and performance and its dashboard can offer benefits like:-

Data collection and storage - Data streams from various internal and external sources are collected and stored in a central database. The data collected would be both historical and real-time, containing details of suppliers, buyers, buyer preferences, logistics, inventory etc. Using Power BI and analytics on such data can bring out insights and aid decision-making.

Accessing real-time data - The supply chain team does not need to go through the raw data or separate data sheets from various departments to manage the supply chain. Power BI helps consolidate data from various departments and visually display the required data on a dashboard. The dashboard is updated routinely based on the data that is streamed into the database. 

Report customization - Power BI gives users the flexibility to check different metrics and KPIs. While a dashboard gives a broad macro-level outlook, it may be necessary for the supply chain team to generate different reports to create analytical, operational, or strategic decisions to make informed decisions. Since data from all departments is routed to the central database or central servers. it becomes easy to generate reports based on various departments. Power BI can generate customized dashboards to meet different business requirements. 

Movement tracking - Analysis of logistics data like forecasting movement of items to various or specific warehouses, status updates of shipments etc., can be done using Power BI. This is enabled by using inactive model relationships in the data and fact tables using Power BI. Doing this enables data to be filtered by various categories like the product, region, warehouse, customer, item movement, shipping costs etc.

Sales monitoring - Power BI can be synced with a customer relationship management system (CRM) and can be used to extract and present it in a visual format in form of reports or a dashboard. Such representation can show an increase, decrease, or stagnation in sales in a graphical form.

Inventory management - Power BI can be used to track inventory across warehouses and departments. It can be used to track raw materials, work in progress and finished goods inventory. Using real-time analytics and dashboard views, a supply chain team can track the stock levels and movement of material across purchase and sales departments. 

Measuring quality - Power BI can be used to analyze the quality of supplies by measuring the downtime caused due to raw material quality issues. Power BI can break down the reports by defect type, vendor, facility, material etc. 

In conclusion, the implementation of Power BI helps in increasing real-time visibility and minimizing operational variables in supply chain management. Proper implementation of Power BI can help companies in predictive analysis, optimizing their investment and taking data-driven decisions. It can help in improving the process components of reports, dashboards, data visualization and analytics. A Power BI consulting company can help the supply chain team to monitor and manage the business more closely, analyze data, create dashboards and use such analytics to make the right decisions at the right time. 

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