MIS in Wal-Mart

The remarkable growth of Wal-Mart is mainly due to two reasons; continuous focus on customer needs and low cost leader ship that is maintained through efficient supply chain management. In 1991 Wal-Mart invested 4 billion $ in order to build a retail link system in which they connected 10000 Wal-Mart retail suppliers that helped all the suppliers to watch their respective inventory level so that they have enough idea that at what time or day they have to supply the product. This whole process was a two way process suppliers and Wal-Mart both were connected. Suppliers now have a good idea about their respective product that that how well their product is competing against competitors. 

After few years this system was made stronger in a way that it was linked with internet-enabled SCM system that include many things apart from inventory management, like it covered forecasting, replenishment, planning etc. More over forecasting proved to be effective like for some products they can forecast the demand which helped them to reduce inventory storage costs as a result they were able to meet the low cost leadership. This forecasting system used CPFR which is defined as business practice for business partners to share forecasts and results data through the Internet, in order to reduce inventory costs while at the same time, enhancing product availability across the supply chain.

Cognos 10

Boeing is dealing in a complex business ranging from space products to airplanes. To support their analysts Boeing is using cognos 10. Previously the financial analysts of Boeing used to take weeks and even a month to gather critical management information in order to make timely decisions but after using IBM cogno 10 it takes few minutes to come up with a decision. Basically in this cognos develop dashboards and other analytical data for them which resulted in effective decision making. Their military customer used to pressurize them to do things better, cheaper, smarter and faster. This system helped them to increase productivity.

Moreover this helped them in savings also in a way that their payback increased to 10 times which means that for every one dollar they spent they will get 10 dollars in return. Apart from that it also provides different types of charts according to the data. We simply need to enter or we have to insert data and then cognos will create charts of that data. It also makes different kinds of graph as well as 3D images that are helpful in analyzing the company’s performance. This whole program is centralized so every employee related to decision making can use this.