Business Intelligence on demand

• Manual tasks – performed by people without help from any IT solutions. A review of the printed paperwork is one example.

• Semi-Automated tasks – performed by people with the help of some transactional IT application. Taking customer order via telephone is a good example for this one. In this case Order Management System is involved and data is captured directly into the screen that sets off series of follow-up steps in the business process

• Fully-Automated tasks – performed by an IT application without human help. For example, order information is transferred from the Order Management System to the Shop Floor Management System via system to system interface. 

 Ability of the business to improve itself and fix problems lies in its ability to capture vital transactional information and present it in a context that can be helpful from operational standpoint. For many years software world of enterprise applications was occupied with building ability to capture the core business transactions of the business from taking orders to recording shipping information. However, having a historic data produced out of the data warehouse will show the problematic situation if such exists but will fail to help identify actionable steps to fix the problem.

In the last several years several technologies evolved including Business Process Management Systems that deal with capturing all or most of the steps in the business process and presenting the management with actual statistics coming from the operation. These systems also brought new technologies such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that create dashboards for all levels of management to see what is going on in the business process.

So is it enough to have a combination of an ERP system and BPMS to react quickly? This was the question that engineers at Oco Inc. were asking themselves. And the conclusion they came up with was – no, it is not enough. You need another level of sophistication to allow linking the transactional data and operational data together, review the trends of past performance and offer as complete of a picture as possible to act quickly. And even more importantly, offer it as an on demand solution that can be quickly integrated into existing IT infrastructure.

Oco Inc. offers several solutions around procurement, supply chain and operations management:

• Inventory - FG Inventory Analysis,  Excess and Short Inventory, On-Time Delivery Performance, Inventory Timeline

• Transportation and Logistics - Transportation Cost,  Load Leveling, On-Time Shipping

• Sourcing & Procurement - Supplier Cost Productivity, Purchase Order Status, Supplier Scorecard, Strategic Sourcing

• Customer Service - Customer Scorecard, Reasons for Stockouts, Delivery Performance, Deductions/Allowance Analysis

• Asset Management - Event Maintenance Spend, Site Maintenance Spend, Service Delivery Performance

• Quality & Production - Defect Rate – DPMO, Cost of Quality Summary, Manufacturing Cycle Times

If you are looking for cost effective ways to analyze your operation on an on-going basis, Oco’s offerings might be right up your alley.