Anyone expecting their first child has probably been told by a gloating-doting grandparent-to be that their lives are about to change dramatically. This is of course untrue as in reality dramatically is too simple a word and in any event, that “change” is far, far different than granny suggests. Your pre-natal life as you know it will become obsolete at the snip of a chord.

Sleep, sanity, social life and other activities beginning with “s” will soon become history as you become slaves to the mini-me you have created who appears to have over active exhaust systems at both ends. Night and day whizz past in a blur of endless demands for food and cleaning and screaming and that is just the husband.

Did you know what sex the little darling was before the big day or did you wait and see what would be delivered? Did you and the family try to predict boy or girl based on family history? You know, things like the first born is always a boy if the birth takes place in summer. Or, it must be a girl based on the size of the baby bump etc., etc.

Despite all the indicators and family history and old wives’ tales you got the sex of the baby wrong? Dear me, there are only 2 options after all! If you can get that 50/50 prediction wrong how on earth do people cope in the supply chain business when the number and type of variables is enormous? (You knew the segue was coming and there it is!)

What is going to happen in the future is always difficult to predict even remotely accurately.

Hold on a minute but what about all that Supply Chain data? Your Management Information System is running red hot; the KPI Dashboard has digital steam coming out of its ears and you can see numbers bursting out of the air vents on the top of the Data Warehouse. You have more data available than you can shake a USB Data Stick at!

The problem is that all those numbers and colour coded percentages help to tell you everything that has already happened in your Supply Chain. Good to know of course but isn’t it better to know why certain events happened and how they can be avoided in the future?

I can imagine your last S&OP meeting involved making considered changes to plans and activities to correct certain deficiencies or to take advantage of opportunities. All well and good but the internal operational deficiency you have is that you must wait weeks or months or longer to find out if your strategy was successful.

What you need is an analytical tool to take advantage of all that data and convert it into actionable information. A tool which allows you to diagnose the precise causes of past events and which allows you to model the probable results of your decisions into the future. These tools exist as cost effective cloud based solutions but most companies stubbornly remain convinced that their expensively installed MIS/ERP should be sufficient. Put simply, alone, they are not.

When you were thinking about starting a family if you knew which “tadpole” was most likely to win the race you would not be on a ladder hurriedly repainting the nursery blue!

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