Accelerate Inventory Management insights with Google Cloud Cortex Framework
John Studdert
Solution Manager, Google Cloud Cortex Framework
Lucia Subatin
Solution Engineering Technical Lead, Cortex Framework, Google Cloud
Inventory management is a critical part of any supply chain. By keeping track of inventory levels, businesses can ensure that they have the right amount of products on hand to meet customer demand, while also avoiding overstocking or understocking. However, managing inventory can be a challenge, especially in today's complex and ever-changing supply chains.
Data is often siloed within different departments or systems, making it difficult to get a complete view of inventory levels across the entire network of the business. Meanwhile, a focus on supply chain visibility and insights has only increased with the risk of supply chain disruptions, scarcity, and delays along with demand volatility and rapidly changing business dynamics and trends.
The journey to overcome these data challenges has traditionally been a difficult one. Existing solutions have often lacked a unified semantic view for easier adoption by users. Data has often been fragmented and with limited means to integrate. Traditional platforms also lacked unified AI capabilities, making use of AI/ML technically complex and time consuming.
To help with these data challenges, many companies choose Google’s Data Cloud to integrate, accelerate and enhance business insights through a cloud-first data platform approach with BigQuery to power data-driven innovation at scale. Next, they take advantage of best practices and accelerator content delivered with Google Cloud Cortex Framework to establish an open, scalable data foundation that can enable connected insights across a variety of use cases.
Today, we’re excited to announce the latest Cortex Data Foundation release which includes packaged analytics solution templates and content focused on inventory management.
Introducing new analytics content for Inventory Management
Release 4.2 of Google Cloud Cortex Framework includes new data marts, semantic views and templates of Looker dashboards to support operational analytics and relevant metrics for inventory management. These are designed to help overcome the above challenges, and provide a starting point for customers to adapt further to the specific needs of their business. Sample dashboards give visibility to common industry KPIs tracked by everyone from supply chain executives (such as a Chief Supply Officer) to operational managers (such as inventory managers), such as:
Inventory across stock categories (unrestricted, restricted) with ability to drill down to the details
Past inventory, to spot trends and benchmark KPIs (such as Inventory Value, Quantity, and Days of Supply)
Inventory that may age
Slow moving inventory
Inventory management is also closely linked to other aspects of the supply chain. More broadly, these insights can be combined with related content, both in this new release (such as vendor performance) and with existing content to give a broader picture of your supply chain health.
What’s next
This release extends prior content releases for SAP and other data sources to further enhance the value of Cortex Data Foundation across private, public and community data sources. Google Cloud Cortex Framework continues to expand content to better meet our customers' needs on data analytics transformation journeys. Stay tuned for more announcements coming soon!
To learn more about Google Cloud Cortex Framework, visit our solution page, and try out Cortex Data Foundation today to discover what's possible!
