I watched the movie "The Luckiest Girl Alive" last night. In one of the scenes, a chief editor provides feedback on an article: "If you want to write something that people will love, write it like no one will ever read it, with all your heart poured into the writing." And that got me thinking. This was so true of the world of business as well. The business world is so driven by immediate gratification and execution that we hardly get time to pour our hearts and, more importantly, our thoughts into addressing many business challenges and issues that plague us. We are always under the fear of failure, under the fear of how the next quarterly call will go, how the stakeholders will react, and whatnot. We keep looking for whatever bright and shiny comes our way to leverage it on our nagging business challenges. And the result is those challenges keep on coming back. We often hear the statement that the world of business is driven by value. And hence, that holds for the world of supply chain management as well. The entire concept of value stream mapping is to understand which activities within certain processes or a specific process are not adding value to the final deliverable. But do we translate the same concept of value to the overall world of business? The same approach needs to be leveraged when we think about analytics. When we think about analytics or how we need to leverage analytics, how to implement analytics, or simply need to train our workforce in analytics approaches and methodologies, we need to explore how that specific approach will deliver value. We need to leverage value-based supply chain analytics. And the critical aspect to understand or keep in mind here is that value doesn't always mean profitability or cost reduction. Sometimes value can also be the ability to develop a capability that may not immediately deliver revenue or cost savings but well, or may eventually, in the future, become a competitive differentiator. A big challenge in applied analytics is that although the first step starts correctly and is all about understanding the business problem, the following steps focus on immediately defining and translating that problem into an analytics approach. What this means is that often, the solution may not lie in a new algorithm, yet a new algorithm is forced on the problem, marginal benefits coaxed out and celebrated. The problem persists! And will come back at a later date. Because in this hype of digital products and solutions, and often in the quest to sell them to companies, solutions are thrown upon unsuspecting clients in silos. Nobody takes time to step back and think about the problem unbiasedly. To go back to the opening quote, we do not get time to pour our hearts into thinking about the solution. We look for an immediate and available way to, in many cases, put a band-aid on the leak. I think an entire framework needs to be leveraged when thinking about a business problem. The technology element and digital and analytics tools come much later in that framework. However, that framework is not within the scope of this article. In this article, we jump to the point where we have already decided that analytics can play a crucial role. And even at this point in the framework, there are few strategic ways to look at analytics solutions before thinking about an exact analytics algorithm or tool. One of those strategic steps is to take a big-picture view of the analytics portfolio, to evaluate opportunities to integrate multiple analytics solutions to address problems that have nagged the world of supply chain for decades.

The Power of Solution Integration

An example of an opportunity to leverage value-based supply chain analytics can be route optimization. We talk about many sophisticated and fancy analytics approaches and methodologies, like dynamics routing, AI, and ML-enabled routing, which improve and enhance the way we currently perform route optimization. AI and ML methodologies can help us address challenges within route optimization that current solutions and algorithms cannot address. But note that the critical word in the previous sentence was within. While advances in technology and computing can help address the constraints that these solutions faced because of constraints in technology and computing power, as a route optimization professional or if you are a transportation manager, you know that a significant aspect of challenges emerge from other issues that your fleet runs into on a day-to-day basis. And this is the reason that combining one emerging or advanced technology becomes imperative. Continuing the example, route optimization solutions must be tightly integrated with fleet management software. Yet, in the real world, these two have distinct silos. The information that may be collected, processed, and analyzed from fleet management solutions does not interact seamlessly and extensively with route optimization solutions. Because of this lack of integration, both these solutions are not leveraged optimally in the real world. If you are familiar with route optimization, route optimization software can do nothing about suboptimal routes resulting from many factors or events in the real world. Most of the route optimization solutions companies leverage today are reactive and passive. We enter or feed some data to it, and they spit out some results, which are then leveraged to plan the routes. But the realities change daily and hourly as your fleet or drivers hit the road. And none of that may be incorporated into your route optimization solution because your fleet management solutions might not be tightly integrated with your route optimization solution. We talk about IoT-enabled solutions and incorporating IoT technology into fleet management solutions. But as long as we keep these solutions siloed, we are not extracting total value from these solutions. The good news is that technology today, specifically for platforms like SAP BTP, is an example. Other platforms from leading cloud providers allow you to do these integrations more seamlessly. So next time when you brainstorm to map out your technology portfolio, and you believe some of your technologies or tools or solutions that you are currently using are constrained, think whether some of those constraints can be eliminated by pairing a few different technologies together, tightly integrating them to create new capabilities.