Pairing Data and Analytics for Inventory Management

⇨ Data management and integration emerged as a consistent theme impacting visibility and occurred among the top pain points in the current state, as highlighted in the responses to our latest survey on inventory management.

⇨ Analytics is considered an essential ingredient of visibility and hence emerged among many choices regarding requirements that SAPinsiders have in mind to help execute their strategies.

⇨ Combining optimal data management with robust analytics helps build a solid foundation for inventory management.

As supply chain risks increase and businesses become more complex and globalized, inventory management challenges are growing exponentially. Inventory Optimization emerged as a key focus area over the next two years for SAPinsiders in our recent research, Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud. As organizations still struggle with fluctuating demand patterns developed during the pandemic, inventory policies are also growing. Hence, it is unsurprising that inventory management and optimization remain key focus areas. To understand the perspectives of SAPinsiders, we surveyed them on inventory management and optimization topics from September 2022 to November 2022. In this article, we explore the focus on combining data management and analytics for optimal inventory management, a theme that emerged in the survey responses.

Data management and integration emerged as a consistent theme affecting visibility and occurred among the top pain points in the current state. 68% of respondents showed that effective leadership and centralization of inventory data were essential to them. As digitalization speeds up, data is being generated exponentially across the enterprise, resulting in data fragmentation and silos. A single source of truth data helps provide the foundation for visibility. The underlying data is the key to ensuring that the visibility provided is valuable and can be leveraged for inventory management, planning, and advanced analytics. Hence, ensuring data consistency and quality is among the top strategies. Reducing information latency provides timely insights and thus helps address possible disruptions and risks on time.

Analytics is considered an essential ingredient of visibility and hence emerged among many choices regarding requirements that SAPinsiders have in mind to help execute their strategies. 69% SAPinsiders have shown that they want to upgrade by leveraging advanced analytics tools in their inventory planning, including AIoT. They want to incorporate these aspects into their inventory planning and optimization methodologies. Lack of internal skill set emerged as a critical challenge towards building robust inventory management and planning capabilities. It is, therefore, not surprising that helping employees develop skills to make the best of data and analytics in inventory management and planning is a crucial requirement. Siloed analytics is another pain point that SAPinsiders want to eliminate for analytics. Since other supply chain sub-functions impact inventory, they want tighter integration with analytics approaches in those interfacing areas.