Business Intelligence (BI) is experiencing a resurgence, in the media at least, along with associated applications like Sales and Operations Planning (SOP). I met with the owner of a small BI consulting services company for dinner last week and found a kindred spirit related to what the real power of BI is. Large companies have the issue of many non-integrated systems and databases. Small companies deal with accurate data. Both deal with a BI infrastructure that allows centralizing and then innovatively using the information to assess, monitor and predict how the business is doing and will do. One reason why …read more

The way it is being touted in the press you would think that the BI related Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) is the latest new approach to managing business performance. In fact SOP is close to a 40 year old business process that allows aggregate planning to be assessed and passed down to specific finished goods planned in manufacturing companies. The early forms used planning bills of material and rough cut profiles in Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII) systems to generate top down plans and bottom up assessment of performance. This along with excellent master scheduling business processes were best practices …read more