Data Lake and News
The data from Outperform Planning is published into a data lake; which is then picked up by both the Business Intelligence and News Reporters. The news reporters are services that are continually on the lookout for situations in the live plan that represent opportunities to improve the margin of the overall plan.
The news reporters relate to a role in the business process. The most commonly used news reports are inventory exceptions, shelf life violations, scheduling conflicts and excess stock. The news reporters after completing detecting; provide both the number of incidents as well as the value of it. A pareto analysis of the number of incidents vs the value provides the user with the ability to pick easy wins. An easy win is when resolving the few incidents that cause the most financial impact; which also makes it worth your time to investigate. If there is a long “tail” of incidents that have a minor financial impact, it is something that could be investigated later.
The news items contain the details of the exceptions, which are sorted by level of importance by default. The user can attend to the news items through a workflow that is linked to the news item’s data scope. These news items can then be marked as detected, reported, acknowledged and resolved.
Benefits
- Prescriptive analytics: While the forecasting and planning engines provide predictive analytics, the news reporters provide you with prescriptive analytics to help you make decisions that improve the bottom line.
- Orchestration: The news reporters enable the user to be master of orchestration rather than being a specialist in certain areas of operation.
- Prioritization: We all have limited time with many fires to put out, the news reports by providing the value of the exception allow us to focus on incidents that add the most to the bottom line.