Enterprise Resource Planning systems have been introduced to support the efficient and effective execution of business processes. In practice, this may not fully succeed. This also holds in particular for inventory management (IM), which forms a part of supply chain management. Within this research, by analyzing the IM business process theoretically, eleven potential benefits are indicated. Next, by using a Business Intelligence approach, key performance indicators (KPIs) are selected to measure the performance of IM sub-processes. Integration of these approaches yields an IM performance decision support framework that can be used to obtain a generic, coherent picture of the fundamental IM processes in an organization. In addition, by tracking and analyzing KPI measurements, adequate decisions can be prepared towards the improvement of the operational IM performance. The proposed framework is validated using experts’ opinions and a comparative case study. The experts’ comments yielded a list of top-10 KPIs, based on the measurements of which a set of quick wins can be determined. The case study results show that some of the identified potential benefits are also observed in practice. Future research may reveal that comparable performance improvements are possible in other IM environments (and even in other supply chain domains) based on similar decision support frameworks.
Towards a decision support framework for technologies used in cold supply chain traceability
