Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse Installation and Configuration Guide > Configuring Siebel Supply Chain Analytics >

Overview of Siebel Supply Chain Analytics

The Siebel Supply Chain Analytics applications allows you to analyze your organization's inventory to maintain a tight operating and audit control. Inventory is a considerable cost to most organizations, but it is important to adequately serve customer sales. Managing and minimizing your organization's inventory investment can reduce costs and ultimately contribute to the competitiveness of your organization. Because operating at the lowest cost while maintaining customer service allows for competitive advantage, minimizing your inventory costs can help your organization in the marketplace.

The Siebel Supply Chain Analytics applications has four functional areas:

• Bill of Materials. The Bill of Materials (BOM) functional area allows you to determine the profit margin of the components that comprise the finished goods. BOM allows you to keep up with the most viable vendors in terms of cost and profit, and to keep your sales organization aware of product delivery status, including shortages.
• Inventory Transactions. The Inventory Transactions functional area allows you to analyze the various types of events and tasks that occur. Examples of these activities include tracking inventory by type of movement. For example, transfer, issues, receipts, returns, sales, and so on. It allows the user to understand the impact of these activities on business operations, and allows the identification of problematic trends early. For example, large quantities of product in-transit.
• Inventory Balances. The Inventory Balances functional area allows you to analyze the inventory held by an organization in relation to a number of different dimensions. For example, Product type, Product number, Storage location, Plant, Consigned Inventory, Restricted, and so on. It allows the user the ability to understand and determine the optimal distribution of assets as well as identify potential issues such as unnecessary build up of inventories.
• Customer and Supplier Returns. The Customer and Supplier Returns functional area allows the user to specifically monitor the return of product by both Customers and Suppliers. At a Product level, it allows the user to identify early, potential, Customer-satisfaction issues relating to problematic Suppliers and Product.