Increasingly, Business Intelligence is not only used to make meaningful information out of raw data and just inform the right people only, but also to automatically trigger ACTION!
Alerts in Business Intelligence is nothing new. When certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) hit certain levels, alerts may be triggered automatically and sent to various people. There is no reason that this cannot be used to automatically trigger actions also!
Improve Business Performance with Trigger Points is an interesting article that talks about alerts that are triggered when KPIs reach certain levels - High or Low.
There is no reason why BI cannot go further and trigger automatic actions themselves also in certain cases.
This is nothing new on Wall Street. Automated Buy and Sell Stop Loss orders that trigger to buy or sell stock when a particular share price reaches a low or a high is old news!
However, BI, especially real-time BI for Operational Decision making can help BI achieve its true potential much, much more with this kind of automatic triggering.
Retail industries are making use of this real-time inventory and Point of Sale data to automatically place orders for replenishment. If inventory of certain SKUs reach certain levels based purely on information about stock, replenishments and sales, automatic re-orders are kicked off.
Many retail industries are still struggling with physical Inventory taking since it is a troublesome, manually labor intensive and inaccurate process at best. But reordering can be comfortably done even with these inaccuracies. It does not matter if you re-order 1000 new packs of toilet paper when the stock on the shelves are exactly 50 or 52!
Business Intelligence can go a long way in automatically kicking off Promotional pricing at certain regions, zones or even individual stores based on data you are collecting and trends that they are indicating. Some of these decisions need not wait for a human being to confirm what the computer can figure out and implement with a few business rules themselves!
Interesting approach and take that will take on more importance as time goes along and some smart companies find sane and useful ways of applying them!
How much of Human life is lost in waiting - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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