Data-Driven Inventory Management Solution for Procurement and Supply Chain of Utility Company

Abstract

An efficient inventory management solution in procurement and supply chain management (SCM) plays a vital role in ensuring the nominal working capital and increasing profitability in a large company like National Utility Company (NUC). However, in Malaysian NUC, the SCM process in utility goods warehouse is still done manually. This caused various materials administration and storage issues such as mismatch demand between supplier and customers, inefficient resource utilization and project delay. Therefore, this paper aims to review studies in data-driven solution, inventory management solution and proposes a new data-driven inventory management model based on the business intelligence framework. This study starts with a literature review analysis of supply chain and inventory management concept with current practice in the big data business solution era. This is followed by the development of data-driven inventory management model for procurement and supply chain. As a result, this new model corroborates five major insights for best practice including inventory visibility management, the healthy outlook in material scheduling, inventory classification and segmentation, demand forecasting and service level planning. This paper concludes that the manual warehouse management can be digitally transformed into data-driven inventory management by leveraging on the BI platform which able to provide more business insights to a large company similar to the utility company.