Last fall, Tom Singer of Tompkins International attended a review meeting to discuss a client's options on upgrading or replacing their existing warehouse management system (WMS). During the session, someone mentioned the importance of factoring Business Intelligence (BI) into the equation and began to explain why the dashboard and reporting capabilities of any prospective solution should be considered.
This provoked an immediate reaction from a senior logistics VP, who said that he had heard this same song and dance before when his company's current WMS was selected. And he has been waiting seven years and still does not have his dashboards.
Many organizations have an untapped wealth of supply chain performance data locked away in their systems. Executives and managers constantly clamor to get their hands on this information so that they can identify issues and trends in a timely manner.
