Business Intelligence for Supply Chain Management: Trends from Scholarly Literature and from the World of Practice

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the possible role of Business Intelligence to tackle Supply Chain Management issues. We conducted a previous literature review on the basis of 122 writings selected thorough keyword search, backward search and forward search. This literature review revealed that Business Intelligence is taken into consideration by a minority, but growing, percentage of writings as a possible solution to tackle Supply Chain challenges. The main outcomes stemming from this literature search were identified and synthesized in a Concept Matrix. After investigating the state-of-the-art of scholarly writings on Business Intelligence in Supply Chain Management, we sought to collect some insights on how Business Intelligence is being perceived and implemented in the world of supply chain practice. We interviewed three practitioners from three important international consulting firms working in the fields of Supply Chain and Business Intelligence, and we collected institutional documents and several case descriptions. We found that the role of Business Intelligence solutions in Supply Chain Management is wider than that identified by scholarly literature. According to our field research, we also found that the adoption of BI solutions for managing the supply chain may be negatively influenced by a factor that has not been taken into consideration by literature so far, i.e. the previous implementation of ERP solutions.