Supply chain intelligence in e-business environment

It has become essential for companies to closely examine and measure the effectiveness of supply chain processes in taking intelligent decisions. Application of Business Intelligence (BI) to various Supply Chain Management (SCM) functions and product life cycles can help to analyze products, processes, components, and materials, and lead to Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI). The objective of Supply Chain Intelligence is application of data warehouse and business intelligence methods on a strategic, enterprise scale across the supply chain and product life cycle. When this objective is achieved, SCI emerges. SCI demands tighter integration of manufacturing into analytics. And, information resulting from the integration is critical to the identification of design issues and costs through out the product life cycle. This, in turn, requires appropriate data integration infrastructure, which provides capability to extract, transform and load data acquired from multiple enterprise sources. The best contemporary known infrastructure of this kind is data warehousing.