Role of Business Intelligence in Decision Making and Enhancing Competitive Advantage in supply Chain Operations in Selected Engineering and Pharmaceutical Organization

Abstract

Today s Business World is ever challenging and changing at an amazing speed and fierce global competition has compelled business organizations to enhance the speed, quality, performance and reduce cost. All these require timely and effective decision-making, which increases need of decision support systems and technologies like Business Intelligence (BI) that help the decision makers to transform data into meaningful, actionable information or insights. Reliable business insights provide a great flexibility and agility to the organization, especially when it comes to complex supply chains that involve huge amount of data. With huge and complex data, the Supply Chain, especially in pharmaceutical and engineering organizations, BI can be a great tool to transform complex data into actionable business insights. BI continues to be a promising technology and hence growing organizations consider top priority for enhancing their BI capabilities. A careful study of BI is therefore becoming very much critical for many mid to large Organizations.In this study, we conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify the critical issues organizations might need to consider while implementing BI. The focus of the study was to determine the effect of BI tool on quality of decision-making, performance management and competitive advantage in supply chain operations in pharmaceutical and engineering organizations. This is a quantitative research study, which was preceded by a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews of various managers using judgmental sampling and BI users to get practical insights on the usage of BI and the good practices for effective dashboard design. The learnings from these interviews were used to identify key variables that were used for the survey questionnaire used for quantitative study, designed to capture the impact on quality of decision-making and organizational growth.