A STUDY ON IMPROVING SUPPLY CHAIN USING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING DHARA LOGISTICS
V GUNASEKAR , K KAAVYA
Business intelligence (BI) is software that ingests business data and presents it in user-friendly views such as reports, dashboards, charts and graphs. BI tools enable business users to access different types of data — historical and current, third-party and in-house, as well as semi-structured data and unstructured data like social media. Users can analyze this information to gain insights into how the business is performing. According to CIO magazine: “Although business intelligence does not tell business users what to do or what will happen if they take a certain course, neither is BI only about generating reports. Rather, BI offers a way for people to examine data to understand trends and derive insights.” Organizations can use the insights gained from business intelligence and data analysis to improve business decisions, identify problems or issues, spot market trends, and find new revenue or business opportunities.
BI platforms traditionally rely on data warehouses for their baseline information. A data warehouse aggregates data from multiple data sources into one central system to support business analytics and reporting. Business intelligence software queries the warehouse and presents the results to the user in the form of reports, charts and maps. Data warehouses can include an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine to support multidimensional queries. “OLAP provides powerful technology for data discovery, facilitating business intelligence, complex analytic calculations and predictive analytics,” says IBM offering manager Doug Dailey in his data warehousing blog. “One of the main benefits of OLAP is the consistency of information and calculations it uses to drive data to improve product quality, customer interactions and process improvements.” Some newer business intelligence solutions can extract and ingest raw data directly using technology such as Hadoop, but data warehouses are still the data source of choice in many cases.
