Searching SCM World’s content library for ‘big data analytics’ turns up more than 1,200 citations. The first screen alone includes examples for spend analytics, customer service performance, manufacturing variability, logistics optimization, consumer demand forecasting and supply chain risk management.
The common thread is use of a two-stage logic for systematically finding answers to complicated business problems. Stage one is about classifying information sources according to their data structures, and stage two is about searching for correlation and/or causality among the variables assumed to be important to doing the work better.