Traditionally viewed as a cost center, Supply Chain projects often took a backseat to work more closely tied to revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the impact an ineffective supply chain can have on the bottom line. On an even bigger scale, Rear Admiral John Polowczyk said in an interview with Axios:
“Today, I, as leader of FEMA’s supply chain task force, am blind to where all the product is.”
Enabling advanced analytics for supply chains is complex business and one where scale (data volume, user concurrency, vendors, products, etc.) can be a significant barrier-to-entry. Before COVID-19, running Supply Chain Analytics at massive scale was, to some companies, a nice-to-have capability. Today is a new day – and the ability to quickly navigate the entire supply chain, to see where demand is high, what customers are buying, where the product sits and where it should move, is quickly becoming an imperative.
“An Impossible Ask”
When first partnering with Kyvos, some Supply Chain and Retail customers believe they are making “an impossible ask.” They may have already spent months trying to build their BI platform on legacy or open-source technology. When that project doesn’t scale, they carry that perception/expectation with them into the next effort. Working with Kyvos, these customers quickly begin to see what’s possible – interactive access to data not only across the supply chain, but at a level of granularity that had been unthinkable with other technology.
Two Things You Need
Making this happen is no small task, as it means addressing the longtime challenge for OLAP on big data – how do you enable performance at a massive scale?
Solving it requires both managing terabytes and petabytes of volume and enabling an interactive user experience for hundreds, if not thousands, of BI analysts. Scale and Performance have long been inversely proportional – to get more of A meant less of B and vice versa. So, we’re facing a two-part challenge:
Scale – Enable thousands of users to access to the full depth and breadth of their data – across all inventory, all stores, all vendors. Many cloud and on-premise platforms provide scale, but scale alone doesn’t enable insights.
Performance – Quickly and effectively navigating massive data is something else entirely, and it’s the piece that traditional OLAP technologies simply were not designed to address. On top of this, most modern data platforms have a “blind spot” when it comes to enabling interactive analytics. The clouds have either ignored the need for interactive analytics (OLAP) or allow only their legacy BI tools and formats, limiting your options and choice.
This means companies with mature, sophisticated OLAP cubes can often end up in a situation where their chosen target architecture doesn’t allow for a smooth migration. So, what do companies that find themselves in this position do?
- Blow-up their legacy cubes and start from scratch?
- Plead with IT to pick a different platform?
- Compromise on key business requirements to fit the limits of the platform?
The answer is “None of the above” because this is the gap Kyvos fills.
Since Kyvos includes all dimensions, measures, and facts needed to answer any relevant question, you no longer have to anticipate what should be included – because everything is included. No compromises are made in terms of aggregations – data is kept and persisted at whatever grain the business requires. IT no longer needs to manage multiple, aggregate tables in order to achieve performant BI queries. What had taken months – and showed limited results – is now fully implemented in a matter of weeks.
These purpose-built cubes support multiple teams and functions – Forecasting, Inventory, Supplier Performance, Sales and Operations, as well as Customer 360, Product 360 and Market Basket Analysis. The scalability supports any number of users, with some clients exposing dashboards externally to select partners and vendors.
A Cube for the Cloud
Companies need the ability to work with their ever-growing data on more cost-effective, modern platforms, but not at the cost of forsaking key elements (like cubes) that help drive core business functions.
Kyvos fills this gap by delivering a massively scalable OLAP solution for both cloud and big data environments. Once your data is consolidated on the cloud or big data platform, Kyvos leverages the data infrastructure itself to build multidimensional cubes at a scale that has never been possible before. All possible combinations are pre-aggregated and calculated ahead of time. Now, when the query comes in, the results are delivered instantly.
In terms of building the cube, you can build cubes on hundreds of dimensions and measures, combine multiple dimensions and fact tables, and deal with complex data structures without having to start from scratch. You can bring your existing, mature data models from traditional environments to the cloud or big data infrastructures and start very quickly.
Since these cubes are stored on the data platform itself, there are no memory or scale limitations. This means you can aggregate years of data and see trends and YoY views, or drill down to Store-Item or Item-Supplier level details almost instantly.
Your existing BI tools can connect to the Kyvos cubes, while your business users navigate all their data. The Semantic layer ensures business users can work with the data in terms that make sense to them, without worrying about underlying data complexities or translating logical and physical models. And they can perform in-depth analysis with speed on much larger volumes without the need to compromise on business requirements and gain full visibility into and across their supply chain.
The need to respond quickly, NOW
Visibility into all aspects of your data means you have the flexibility to ask the right questions, without the need to re-engineer the underlying data. With that, retailers put themselves in a stronger position to navigate unexpected market conditions and cater to sudden changes in consumer demands, even in the most turbulent times.
At Kyvos, we believe that faster and deeper insights into the current COVID-19 crisis will help you plan your actions better and overcome this pandemic. We are therefore offering free unlimited licenses to all government and health organizations across the globe who are working tirelessly to get us out of the COVID-19 crisis.
If you think we can help, click here and we’ll reach out to you.