James Taylor's Decision Management

Continuing this week's analytics theme, check out this article on Using Analytics to Reduce Operational Costs: Purchase to Pay Process. This was a great example of how to use analytics to improve a process but it left me thinking about potential next steps.
You could begin to predict which suppliers were likely to be compliant in the future and factor this into the selection process. You could automate the decision for selecting the supplier in certain circumstances using policies and predictions of reliability, delivery time etc. You could specify the way in which parts are selected for purchase (for price, for reliability, based on contract etc) so that the contracts you have and policies you want are embedded in your processes. All this adds to and complements the kind of investigative analytics described in the post. Don't stop with reports and dashboards, you can do more....